ABSTRACT
The 1784 election offers a neat paradox. It showed clearly enough that the rights of the monarch in the political system could both be asserted and sustained. Pitt, the king’s choice, had been triumphantly endorsed by the electorate. Yet the king’s battles with his political opponents had caused those opponents to refine and develop the notion of party against which George III had ranged himself. Fox’s supporters now began to challenge the royal prerogative with organization, propaganda and a clear platform. Their tactics anticipated later party developments. It may even be, as Professor Cannon has suggested, that the king needed to fight fire with fire by marshalling his own anti-Foxite forces on party lines. Court politicians organized supporters, made arrangements for like-minded MPs to vote together and used propaganda to influence the electorate. An anti-party monarch had to organize a party to defeat his opponents. In the long term, as we shall see, party would expand to fill the vacuum in political life left as royal influence began to decline from the end of the eighteenth century. The king’s victory in 1783–4 had many pyrrhic elements.
