William Pitt the Younger by Joseph Nollekens (1806). Pitt was Prime Minister from 1783 to 1801, and again from 1804 to 1806. In that time, he saw the descent of the French Revolution into ‘the Terror’, the public execution of King Louis XVI, and then a series of European wars in which the spirit of the revolution was exported to neighbouring states. His second term of office coincided with the start of Napoleon Bonaparte’s audacious bid to create a European Empire animated by French political principles.
Part 1 of 2
WE owe our present happiness and prosperity, which has never been equalled in the annals of mankind, to a mixture of monarchical government. We feel and know we are happy under that form of government.*
We consider it as our first duty to maintain and reverence the British constitution, which, for wise and just reasons of lasting and internal policy, attaches inviolability to the sacred person of the Sovereign, though, at the same time, by the responsibility it has annexed to government, by the check of a wise system of laws, and by a mixture of aristocratic and democratical power in the frame of legislation, it has equally exempted itself from the danger arising from the exercise of absolute power on the one hand, and the still more dangerous contagion of popular licentiousness on the other.
The equity of our laws and the freedom of our political system have been the envy of every surrounding nation. It is the boast of the law of England, that it affords equal security and protection to the high and the low, to the rich and the poor.
Similar sentiments were later expressed by George Canning, when under cover of Parliamentary reform some were agitating for republicanism in England. See our post The Power of Balance.
Part Two
Hurricane Ophelia in September 2005, pictured above the eastern seaboard of the United States of America – fortunately, this Ophelia caused little damage. In 1793, a few weeks after after the sensational public execution of King Louis XVI of France in Paris, the British Prime Minister William Pitt likened European politics to a ruinously destructive tropical storm of political extremism, utterly alien to the temperate constitutional monarchy created in England back in 1689. Yet it was, he recognised anxiously, quite possible to import Europe’s tumultuous political ideologies into Britain’s gentler waters, and warned that under no circumstances whatsoever should anyone attempt it.
SUCH is the envied situation of England, which may be compared, if I may be allowed the expression, to the situation of the temperate zone on the surface of the globe, equally removed from the polar frosts on the one hand and the scorching heat of the torrid zone on the other.
And what a splendid contrast does it form to the situation of that country which is exposed to all the tremendous consequences of that ungovernable, that intolerable and destroying spirit, which carries ruin and desolation wherever it goes. Sir, this infection can have no existence in this happy land, unless it is imported, unless it is studiously and industriously brought into this country. These principles are not the natural produce of Great Britain, and it ought to be our first duty and principal concern, to take the most effectual measures in order to stop their growth and progress in this country, as well as in the other nations of Europe.
