Henry
Addington, 1st Viscount Sidmouth, PC (30
May 1757 – 15 February 1844) was a British Tory statesman who served as Prime
Minister of the United Kingdom from 1801 to 1804. Addington is
best known for obtaining the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, an unfavourable peace
with Napoleonic France which
marked the end of the Second Coalition during
the French Revolutionary Wars.
When that treaty broke down he resumed the war, but he was without allies and
conducted relatively weak defensive hostilities, ahead of what would become
the War of the Third Coalition.
He was forced from office in favour of William Pitt the Younger,
who had preceded Addington as Prime Minister. Addington is also known for his
reactionary crackdown on advocates of democratic reforms during a ten-year
spell as Home Secretary from
1812 to 1822. He is the longest continuously serving holder of that office
since it was created in 1782. Henry Addington was the son of Anthony Addington, Pitt the Elder's physician; and Mary Addington, the daughter
of the Rev. Haviland John Hiley, headmaster of Reading School. As a consequence of his father's position,
Addington was a childhood friend of William Pitt the Younger.
Addington studied at Reading School, Winchester, and Brasenose College, Oxford,
and then studied law at Lincoln's Inn. He married Ursula Mary Hammond in 1781; she
brought an income of £1,000 a year into the marriage. The couple had eight
children, of whom six survived to adulthood. Ursula Addington died in 1811; in
1823 Addington married a widow, Marianne Townsend, daughter of William Scott, 1st Baron
Stowell. He was elected to the House of Commons in
1784 as one of the Members of Parliament for Devizes,
and became Speaker of the House of Commons in 1789. In March
1801, William Pitt the Younger resigned
from office, ostensibly over the refusal of King George III to remove some of the existing political
restrictions on Roman Catholics in Ireland (Catholic Emancipation),
but poor health, failure in war, economic collapse, alarming levels of social
unrest due to famine, and irreconcilable divisions within the Cabinet also
played a role. Both Pitt and the King insisted that Addington take over as
Prime Minister, despite his own objections, and his failed attempts to
reconcile the King and Pitt. Foreign policy was the centrepiece of his term in
office. Some historians have been highly critical and said that it was ignorant
and indifferent to Britain's greatest needs. However, Thomas Goldsmith argues
that Addington and Hawkesbury conducted a logical, consistent and eurocentric
balance-of-power policy, rooted in rules and assumptions governing their
conduct, rather than a chaotic free-for-all approach.
Addington's domestic reforms doubled the efficiency of the income tax. In foreign affairs, he secured the Treaty of Amiens in 1802. While the treaty's terms were
the bare minimum that that the British government could accept, Napoleon Bonaparte would
not have agreed to any terms more favourable to the British, and the British
government had reached a state of financial collapse from war expenditure, the
loss of Continental markets for British goods and two successive failed
harvests that had led to widespread famine and social unrest, rendering peace a
necessity. By early 1803, Britain's financial and diplomatic positions had
recovered sufficiently to allow Addington to declare war on France, when it
became clear that the French would not allow a settlement for the defences of
Malta that would have been secure enough to fend off a French invasion that
appeared imminent. At the time and ever since, Addington has been criticised
for his lacklustre conduct of the war and his defensive posture. However,
without allies, Britain's options were limited to defence. He increased the forces,
provided a tax base that could finance an enlarged war and seized several
French possessions. To gain allies, Addington cultivated better relations with
Russia,[2] Austria, and Prussia, which later culminated in the Third Coalition shortly after he left office. Addington
also strengthened British defences against a French invasion through the
building of Martello towers on
the south coast and the
raising of more than 600,000 men at arms.