TWELVE

A Dose of Vitriol

WILLIAM PITT THE YOUNGER’S sheer youthfulness when he came to power was a gift to satirists; many portrayed him as a callow schoolboy, running the country under the watchful eye of his Cambridge tutor George Pretyman. One ‘anecdote’ from the Rolliad, a collection of squibs first published in the Morning Herald, describes a typical day at Downing Street in June 1784:

Mr. Pitt rises about nine, when the weather is clear, but if it should rain, Dr. Prettyman advises him to lie about an hour longer. About ten he generally blows his nose and cuts his toe nails, and while he takes the exercise of his Bidet, Dr. Prettyman reads to him the different petitions and memorials that have been presented to him. About eleven his valet brings in Mr. Atkinson and a warm shirt, and they talk over new scrip, and other matters of finance. Mr. Atkinson has said to his confidential friends round change, that Mr. Pitt always speaks to him with great affability. At twelve Mr. Pitt retires to the water closet, adjoining to which is a small cabinet from whence Mr. Jenkinson confers with him on the secret instructions from Buckingham House …[1]

Now the House of Commons lay at his command, Pitt wasted no time in placing a new India Bill before parliament. As a prelude, a select committee conducted an investigation into the East India Company’s accounts; its report, which came out on 22 June, cast doubt on some numbers submitted by Richard on behalf of the directors.[2] Two days later, Charles James Fox warned MPs not to be ‘led by Forgeries and false Calculations’ into forming a positive impression of the Company’s financial health – causing Richard, in what appears to have been his maiden speech, to defend himself against ‘so foul an imputation’.[3] By the time of the next debate on the Company’s affairs, a week later, Richard had presented the prime minister with a paper rebutting seventy-three negative assertions made by the select committee.[4] ‘I am really almost knocked up with the matters which are & have been in hand,’ he told Robinson.[5]

On 6 July, during a stifling heatwave, Pitt introduced his India legislation to a listless House. A Board of Control would be appointed by the Crown, and vested with powers to supervise all aspects of the East India Company’s civil and military governance at home and in India. The proprietors would lose much of their clout, since they would hold no veto over joint decisions of the Court of Directors and Board of Control. The directors would keep their valuable patronage, which included the appointment of ‘writers’ to the Company’s administration in India, and cadets and assistant surgeons to its armies. The bill passed its second reading, without division, a week later.

ANNE LINDSAY SPENT much of the early summer of 1784 making arrangements for an expedition to the continent. The Lindsay sisters’ circle of friends included the ‘lovely, soft’ Maria Fitzherbert, who had experienced the misfortune of being widowed twice before she was twenty-five. It was in Anne’s box at the opera house that the Prince of Wales was said to have ‘first beheld’ Mrs Fitzherbert. ‘He soon took me aside,’ Anne recalled, ‘to ask me what Angel was it that sat beside me in a white hood? I told him, and from that moment he appeared to live but in the hope of meeting her again and again, and of drowning himself like the poor fly in the sweets he should have shunned.’[6]

The match was ill-starred from the start. Mrs Fitzherbert was certainly gratified by the attentions of the prince, who was six years her junior, but too proper to consent to be his mistress, and her status as both a commoner and a Catholic made it unthinkable they could marry. Such hindrances did not deter the 21-year-old prince, though, and his assault upon the virtue of La Belle Veuve was soon tittle-tattle everywhere.

Anne’s decision to go abroad was in part motivated by the fact that she could now afford to do so; for it was two years since, ‘through Atkinson’s kindness’, she had been ‘blessed with independence enough to venture to form a wish of amusements beyond the common habits’ of her past life. She also felt an urge to cut loose from her benefactor. As she later explained: ‘There was a set of invisible ties of restraint … which I wished to relax, not to break. I thought Atkinson might profit by my absence.’[7] She started casting around for travel companions; one day in June, Mrs Fitzherbert called upon her and proposed they set off as soon as possible.

Richard had grave doubts about the propriety of such a trip. ‘I do not reason upon the measure itself in which there can be nothing wrong but upon the opinions of the World,’ he told Anne on 2 July. ‘Whatever may be our Conviction that a desire to avoid the pursuer is your friend’s Motive, the general opinion will I fear remain fixed that if that purpose had been very sincere the means of carrying it into effect might long since have been found & might still be found without going abroad for two or three Months. Were there any Gentleman of your own family or connection of the Party, I should think nothing of it, but in truth I fear that the fair young Widow so circumstanced makes no Chaperon at all.’[8]

Prince George, for his part, tried to dissuade his inamorata from leaving by means of an absurd display of histrionics, which included swallowing physic – a purgative – to make himself look pale and drawn, and other tactics that Anne considered unworthy of ‘any honest man’. Finally, the evening before Mrs Fitzherbert was due to depart, the prince stabbed himself with a sword. Although he did himself no serious harm, he ‘bled like a calf’, and subsequently threatened to rip off his bandages unless she solemnly promised to marry him when she returned from France. The next morning Mrs Fitzherbert fled for the port of Dover. Anne followed two days later in her newly purchased dark chocolate post-chaise, having ‘bade adieu’ the previous night to the ‘excellent friend’ who had made her adventure possible.[9]

ON 12 JULY, while Anne’s carriage bounced along the turnpike to Dover, Richard was speaking in a parliamentary debate about a bill to suppress smuggling that would – in his view unfairly – make the owner of a ship answerable for an attempt by one of its crew to import even the smallest amount of contraband spirits or tea. Afterwards a writer in the Morning Chronicle, who confessed he had hitherto not been ‘in the habit of admiring Mr. Atkinson’s political character’, commented that Richard’s speech on the subject had been ‘replete with sound reasoning, unanswerable argument, great commercial knowledge, and above all, the present principles of the constitutional laws of the land’.[10]

Certainly, smuggling had reached epidemic levels. In coastal areas, large bands of armed men operated in plain sight; even in London it was ‘no unusual thing to see Gangs of 10, and 15, and 20 Horsemen riding even in the Day time with Impunity’.[11] Law enforcement was too blunt an instrument with which to combat criminality on such a scale. Instead Pitt and his advisors hit upon the tool of tax reduction – for if, they reasoned, the duties on contraband items were lowered so as ‘to make the temptation no longer adequate to the risk’, then smugglers would go out of business.[12] Tea, taxed at an eye-watering 119 per cent, was the obvious commodity on which to test this theory.

Pitt’s proposal was to cut the duty on common Bohea tea to 12½ per cent, and on finer varieties to between 15 and 30 per cent; at the same time, the reduced tea duties would be offset by a marked increase in the window tax. Richard’s fingerprints can be found all over this initiative; several documents in his handwriting crop up among Pitt’s papers, now in the National Archives, with titles such as a ‘Computation of the Average Price of each Species of the Tea now laying in the Company Warehouses uncleared by the Buyers – when the old Duties shall all be deducted & a new one of 12½ per Cent imposed’ and a ‘State of the actual Cost of the Tea to be imported by the India Company this present Summer 1784, with the new Duties payable thereon’.[13]

The measure worked. At a stroke, demand for the East India Company’s legally imported leaves doubled, and its stock soon ran low. While the directors waited for new shipments of tea to arrive from China, they set up a committee – Richard was one of three active members, Francis Baring another – to plug the gap through purchases from European merchants. The smugglers attempted to sabotage the first of the Company’s tea sales in the autumn; a number of strange men with ‘Silk-Handkerchiefs round their Necks, and Weather beaten Countenances’ descended on Leadenhall Street and forced up the auction prices to levels that threatened, but ultimately failed, to wreck the scheme.[14]

Richard had been far from happy with the state in which Pitt placed his India Bill before parliament. ‘I cannot my dearest friend describe to you to how great a degree the publick business has incommoded me since you left us,’ he would write to Anne on 21 July, as the legislation underwent line-by-line scrutiny during the committee stage. ‘The India Bill was brought in without communication and full of Errors & Infirmities. I induced the Directors as a body to make private Representations setting them to rights & prepared all the Remarks & Amendments. They are every one in the course of being adopted & we shall make the Bill a good Bill at last & consistent in its Principle.’[15] The bill passed through the Commons without division on its third reading; apart from some choice invective from Edmund Burke, who had been the chief architect of Fox’s India Bill, it was all quite unremarkable. The king wrote to Pitt the following morning to express his relief: ‘I trust now little more trouble will be given in finishing the business of this Session, as Mr. Fox’s Speech yesterday was I suppose his last Words on the Occasion and that He will retire to his new purchased Villa.’[16] Pitt’s India Act of 1784 would settle the constitution of British rule in India for more than seventy years – until the demise of the East India Company.

WHILE THE SUMMER reached its dog days, and the ranks of ‘country gentlemen’ thinned out as they left town for the shires, Richard remained dutifully at Westminster. Following the smooth passage of the India Act, the opposition were gripped by the conviction that Pitt’s parliamentary majority had been purchased with East India Company money. During a lengthy monologue on 30 July, Edmund Burke pointed to the seats directly behind the ministerial front bench, where Richard and other MPs with Company connections were seated. ‘The India bench,’ Burke proclaimed, ‘was very properly placed above the Treasury Bench, because the latter was subordinate to the former, and ruled by it.’[17] Richard wrote to Robinson late that evening. ‘I think the fates have set a Spell upon me to prevent my getting to Sion Hill,’ he sighed. ‘I cannot describe to you how the India business at both ends of the Town has harassed me. We have fixed the Dividend in the Committee tonight at 8 per Cent without either Fox or Eden making their appearance. They have unchained Burke who raved like a Bedlamite for two hours & I consider this as a proof that the sober Men of the Party mean to absent themselves.’[18]

Early on Sunday 1 August, Richard set out with his niece Dorothy for Hamels Park, the Hertfordshire home of Lady Elizabeth Yorke, the youngest of the Lindsay sisters. He returned to Fenchurch Street that night on his own, carrying a bundle of correspondence addressed to Anne, who had recently arrived at the fashionable resort of Spa. Before forwarding her family’s letters on to Anne, he added one of his own, which serves as an expression of his general world-weariness at this point in his life:

I have since been almost worn out with a new point that has arisen in East India matters which will be managed right, and will I hope in a very few days close our Campaign on India Affairs in Parliament. I cannot attempt to give you in any compass of a Letter the least Idea of the particulars, & shall therefore only say that whilst I am conscious of having done essential Service both to the Company & the Publick, I am equally certain that nobody will thank me in either department. Such is the vile nature of publick business! This my dearest friend I say to yourself. I become every day more & more convinced of the justice of an opinion I long ago gave you that publick business may serve for an amusement, where the Grasp at happiness has failed, but contains nothing in it that comes home to the Heart.[19]

On 18 August, John Robinson hosted a grand party to celebrate the end of the parliamentary session. As Richard told Anne: ‘We all dine tomorrow at Sion Hill viz. Mr. Pitt, Dundas, & the Chancellor.’[20] It was, in fact, Richard who provided the centrepiece of the politicians’ feast that evening, but its carriage across town presented a distinct challenge, as his letter to Robinson suggests: ‘I am lucky enough to have a Turtle under my Command – about lb 60, or 70 – & if I had the means of sending it out to you, should be glad to spare you the trouble of sending for it, but I know not of any Conveyance by which it can be sent with safety therefore shall trust to your sending for it in the course of tomorrow and whether I am at home or not my servants will have instructions where to find it.’[21]

The preparation of a ‘turtle dinner’ was one of the most daunting challenges of the eighteenth-century culinary repertoire. Hannah Glasse opens her recipe for turtle prepared ‘the West India Way’ with the following instructions: ‘Take the turtle out of the water the night before you dress it, and lay it on its back, in the morning cut its head off, and hang it by its hind fins for it to bleed till the blood is all out, then cut the callapee, which is the belly, round, and raise it up; cut as much meat to it as you can, throw it into spring-water with a little salt, cut the fins off, and scald them with the head …’[22] The custom was to serve the turtle in five dishes that showed off its fleshy charms to the greatest effect – the ‘calipash’ (baked back meat), the ‘calipee’ (boiled belly meat), the guts (stewed in a creamy sauce), the fins (served in a clear broth) and, the climax, a tureen of luxurious turtle soup. Oh to have been a fly on the wall – or in the soup – at that particular dinner.

THE PASSING OF THE INDIA ACT by no means restored harmony to Leadenhall Street, for bitter differences would arise that autumn among the directors of the Company and the newly established Board of Control over an issue which had poisoned Indian politics for twenty years – namely, the Nawab of Arcot’s debts. As Paul Benfield’s agent, Richard supported the claims of the men, including several of his fellow directors, who had lent the prince vast sums at what many considered usurious rates of interest; but the chairman of the Company, Nathaniel Smith, took an opposing view. At a meeting of the directors on 23 September, Smith pushed through a draft dispatch to Madras which contained ‘some very extraordinary Complimentary Paragraphs’ about its governor, Lord Macartney, an enemy of the Arcot creditors, as well as drafting a ‘most cruel and insulting Letter’ to the nawab that was highly critical of Benfield.[23]

Richard was one of seven directors who signed a strongly worded dissent from this correspondence on 6 October, absolving themselves from ‘all Responsibility for the Consequences to ensue therefrom’.[24] Two days later the Board of Control, headed by Henry Dundas, decided to radically rewrite Smith’s dispatch to Madras so that it recognized the validity of all the nawab’s debts, and established a sinking fund to settle them with his territorial revenues. To those who believed, like Edmund Burke, that the so-called ‘Arcot Squad’ had exerted undue influence during the general election – here, in the form of payment for services rendered to the ministry, was corroboration.

In the midst of this scheming, on 2 October, Richard was elected an alderman of the City of London. Although a tremendous honour, he felt rather pressed into service – ‘the Devil has at length directed these Aldermen to resign,’ he wrote about the two vacancies which had arisen – but his refusal to stand would have generated too much censure.[25] Following the election, Richard threw an entertainment for his Tower Ward voters at the Ship Tavern. Newspaper accounts suggest there was no shortage of refreshments: ‘One gentleman was picked up and placed in a baker’s basket; he was then carried in state to his own door, preceded by a choice band of choristers smoaking their pipes, and chaunting, “he was drunk, he was drunk, he was drunk when he died!” Another tippling rogue was served up to his wife and family on a window shutter, covered over with tobacco pipes arranged in beautiful order.’[26]

Richard wrote to Anne in the Netherlands on 12 October; he had not heard from her in a while. ‘Still is the Oracle of Brussels silent although Devotions are performed,’ he declared, his heartfelt words suggesting that he was still deeply in love with her:

Keeping within my Heathen Creed, I must say that Destiny has hitherto directed the Views of my Life to Hope. To her therefore I will still burn Incense; alas without hope that a superior Deity will ever assume her rightful Throne. News of our Friends I have none. For the private reason you know of (and for no other) I went to Brighthelmstone on Saturday – returned last night at Midnight. Was sworn in as Alderman today. Dined with the Lord Mayor, in a Company so stupid that Wilkes (who honestly tried) could not enliven it, et me voici, at nine o’Clock waiting for an Interview on India matters which grow infinitely entangled and intending again to take the Command of my Battery as much before the end of the Week as I can.[27]

The ‘private reason’ for Richard’s visit to Brighton was to lobby Pitt, who had taken a house there. Dundas was pressing for Sir Archibald Campbell, recently governor of Jamaica, to be appointed commander-in-chief in India; Richard meanwhile hoped to manoeuvre Anne’s brother, Lord Balcarres, into the colonelcy of the 78th Highlanders, which would make him Campbell’s second-in-command. But his tête-à-tête with the prime minister failed to bear the intended fruit. A member of the Board of Control, Lord Sydney (the recently ennobled Thomas Townshend), an arch-critic of Richard’s contracts during the American war, had warned Pitt to distance himself from Campbell’s nomination: ‘You will find a Combination of the most insatiable Ambition & the most sordid Avarice & Villany at the bottom of this base Work.’[28]

Richard broke the news to Lord Balcarres in a letter dated 29 October:

I am sorry to acquaint you that our India Politicks have gone very perversely, and that by means of Lord Sydney’s persevering in a ministerial recommendation, whilst Mr. Pitt disavowed all interference on the part of the Ministry, the Court of Directors was ensnared & in vindication of what the majority of them thought their own honour, have appointed General Sloper Commander in Chief in India. Your Lordship will have seen some impertinences in the News papers about your being appointed second in command. It is impossible for me to guess how that Report got about for I assure you I never opened my Lips on the subject to any body out of the small Circle that was originally in the knowledge of our Castle building on that subject.[29]

According to rumours in the press, Richard would soon be made a baronet. The Gazetteer reported on 17 November that John Robinson, as a reward for ‘rendering the House of Commons a cypher in the constitution’, had been offered the honour for any friend he cared to name, and had nominated ‘one Atkinson, distinguished for his sagacity in making the rum contract’.[30] Whether this was true or not, the two men hardly saw each other during the autumn of 1784. ‘I think it an age since we met & wish most ardently for an opportunity, though no particularly pressing matter occurs,’ Richard wrote on 2 December. ‘I have been since Sunday confined (mostly in bed) with a Fever, taken I believe just in time to prevent its becoming rather a serious one. It is almost gone but not quite; and I am today for the first time able to sit up the whole day, and hope there is little doubt of my getting clear of it very soon.’[31] Richard’s own assessment of his illness was characteristically sanguine. East India Company minutes hint at its gravity, however, for he was absent from all but two of the fourteen meetings of the directors held in December.

Richard spent January 1785 in Brighton, convalescing beside the wintry sea; by the end of the month, he felt sufficiently recovered to write Dundas a lengthy private memorandum about ‘necessary reforms’ in the Court of Directors.[32] Soon he was back in London.

He next attended East India House on 16 February, where a critical decision – the choice of the next Governor General of Bengal, a successor to Warren Hastings – was scheduled for the following day. According to a report in the Gazetteer, the prime minister summoned Richard, along with Laurence Sulivan, to Downing Street on the eve of the vote, and declared that he wished them to nominate Lord Macartney for the post. Both directors were said to have been dumbfounded at this intervention; Richard apparently replied that the ‘proposition was so contrary to his feelings, and so contradictory to the principles on which his friends had hitherto embraced the interests of Mr. Pitt, that he should exert himself in the Court of Directors, and elsewhere, to oppose the appointment of Lord Macartney’.[33] Whether or not this exchange took place (for it was later denied) would in any case prove immaterial, since Richard was prevented from casting his vote by the ‘most extraordinary accident in the World’.[34]

Next morning, his servant mistakenly gave him the wrong medicine – oil of vitriol, known today as sulphuric acid, instead of the physic that was intended. Without George Fordyce’s swift intervention, the blunder would have killed Richard, and it certainly left him too weak to attend the Court of Directors.

All but two of the twenty-four directors showed up at East India House that day, and when the motion was put ‘that Lord Macartney succeed to Bengal on the Resignation or Removal of Mr. Hastings’, they divided eleven against eleven.[35] It fell to the Secretary to draw a deciding lot from the ballot glass – he pulled out Macartney’s name. ‘What a singular constitution is that of Leadenhall House,’ commented the Gazetteer, ‘that thus the fate of India should depend on a toss-up.’[36] Two weeks later those jesters at the same newspaper came up with an idea for a cartoon: ‘A Contractor Refunding His Ill-gotten Wealth,’ its caption would read. ‘When a certain rum contractor had about a fortnight ago swallowed a dose of vitriol instead of a gentle purgative – Dr. Fordyce hung him up by the heels; a good hint for a caricature!’[37]

Richard next visited East India House on 28 February, in advance of a parliamentary debate about the Nawab of Arcot’s debts and the ministry’s recent recognition of their validity. That evening, in the House of Commons, Charles James Fox moved that correspondence on the subject from the Court of Directors be handed over for inspection; Philip Francis, seconding the motion, warned Pitt and Dundas that ‘their personal characters were more endangered than they perhaps imagined’ by rumours of a ‘collusion between the board of control and the creditors of the nabob’ – a declaration which Dundas, who spoke next, treated ‘with some degree of ridicule’.[38] Just as the debate seemed to have run its natural course, Edmund Burke rose to his feet, showing signs of emotion; what followed would go down as one of this prodigious orator’s most epic speeches.

If Burke’s overarching theme that night was the damage caused by the greed of the East India Company, the chief villain of the piece was Paul Benfield – ‘a criminal, who long since ought to have fattened the region’s kites with his offal’.[39] Richard, as Benfield’s ‘agent and attorney’, fared little better. ‘Every one who hears me, is well acquainted with the sacred friendship, and the steady mutual attachment that subsists between him and the present minister,’ Burke declared, before protesting at the manner in which Richard had been permitted to make Pitt’s India Bill ‘his own’, and the ‘authority with which he brought up clause after clause, to stuff and fatten the rankness of that corrupt Act’. Next, Burke turned his attention to the previous year’s general election, observing that Richard had kept a ‘sort of public office or counting-house’ from which the business of securing Pitt’s majority had been conducted:

It was managed upon India principles, and for an Indian interest. This was the golden cup of abominations; this the chalice of the fornications of rapine, usury, and oppression, which was held out by the gorgeous eastern harlot; which so many of the people, so many of the nobles of this land had drained to the very dregs. Do you think that no reckoning was to follow this lewd debauch? That no payment was to be demanded for this riot of public drunkenness and national prostitution?[40]

The speech, brimming with high-flown imagery, was vintage Burke. He finally sat down at one in the morning, having hectored the chamber for five hours. ‘So absurd, as well as unfounded, did the accusations appear,’ recalled Nathaniel Wraxall, ‘that the treasury bench remained silent’ – but, then, he would say that, for he too was in Paul Benfield’s pocket.[41]

LADY ANNE LINDSAY and Mrs Fitzherbert had arrived at Paris in December 1784. Lady Margaret Fordyce joined them there; the plan was that they would all take a tour of the Swiss glaciers, before returning to England in the summer. But Margaret brought worrying news of Richard’s health; shortly before her departure he had suffered ‘something resembling a paralytic attack’, and his condition remained precarious. ‘My heart,’ wrote Anne, ‘trembled at the sound of the Palsy.’[42] The sisters decided to stay in Paris to await further bulletins.

Richard returned to Brighton in early March, accompanied by his niece Dorothy. His letters to Paris were deceptively cheerful. ‘All you have to do,’ he told Anne, ‘is to double the number of your letters while I am an invalid, as they will be my best medicine; amuse yourself well, and let me partake of it.’[43] And he expressly forbade the sisters from coming home on his account, insisting that their proximity to him would create a wish for more of their society ‘than he ought to be indulged in’.[44]

With the arrival of spring, Richard seemed to rally. Bridget wrote to Dorothy on 19 April:

I am glad your Uncle is better tho’ ever so Little. Some people are even in this country very Long in recovering from a fever and yet Lives many many years which I hope in God may be the case with my good Brother and Freind, if I think ever so Little on the contrary I find it is one of the things I cannot bear to think on. I hope you will be gone to Brighthelmstone if you can be of Service to your Uncle do not mind forms but ask your Uncle and do not waite his asking you is he not in place of a Father and what is there out of Character in atending a Sick relation at any time or any place?[45]

Three days later, Richard felt well enough to sit up in bed and dictate a message for Francis Baring to deliver at East India House ‘concerning the necessity of considerable and immediate Tea Purchases which opinion Mr. B is at liberty to make any use of he pleases’.[46]

But Richard’s improvement turned out to be illusory, and his end was sudden. On 26 May a physician came from Lewes, who ‘found his pulse to be that of a dying man’. At eleven that evening, Richard asked Dorothy to bring him a calf’s foot jelly. While she was out of the room, and his servant was tidying up the bedclothes, he whispered I shall faint, and died ‘without a groan or struggle’.[47]