Commons 1790-1820

The 1818 Parliament saw an intensification of party conflict, as the Whig opposition, having gained a few seats in the general election and installed George Tierney as their Commons leader, made a strong initial muster.

During the 1812 Parliament the war against Napoleonic France ended with the allied victory at Waterloo, 18 June 1815; two sitting Members, Sir Thomas Picton and William Ponsonby, were killed in the battle. A rather absurd war with the USA began in June 1812 and ended in December 1814. Lord Castlereagh, the foreign secretary, played a major role in the diplomatic settlement of Europe. His old rival George Canning re-entered the cabinet in 1816.

The 1807 Parliament saw three Tory administrations (Portland, 1807-9, Perceval, 1809-12, and Liverpool, 1812-27); George III’s final lapse into insanity and the appointment by the Act of February 1811 of his eldest son George, prince of Wales, as regent (with restricted powers for the first year); the only assassination of a British prime minister (Spencer Perceval, in the lobby of the House, by a deranged bankrupt’s pistol, 11 May 1812), and, after some initial disasters, a decisive change of fortune in the war against France, as Viscount We

This Parliament existed for only 138 days, but saw two administrations. The general election consolidated the numerical supremacy of Lord Grenville’s coalition ministry of ‘All the Talents’, but, after carrying abolition of the slave trade, it was brought down in March 1807 by the king’s unyielding resistance to any concessions on Catholic relief. The ailing 3rd duke of Portland became the figurehead premier of a largely Pittite government.

This Parliament saw three administrations and the untimely deaths of the parliamentary giants William Pitt and Charles James Fox.

William Pitt’s revamped administration met the new Parliament with a commanding majority, but the land war was going badly. In 1797, Pitt was assailed by a financial crisis and a naval mutiny, while the threat of invasion by Bonaparte’s army became real. In May that year Charles James Fox and most of his rump of opposition Whigs seceded from Parliament, after calling for reform.

At the dissolution in June 1790, George III seemed to have recovered from the bout of insanity which had caused a political crisis over the issue of a regency in the winter of 1788-9. His 31-year-old prime minister, William Pitt, had been in office for six and a half years, and was at the summit of his power, master of the Commons and the cabinet.