William Petty Fitzmaurice
 William Petty Fitzmaurice    ( politician, deep politician?) | |
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| Born | 2 May 1737 Dublin, Ireland |
| Died | 7 May 1805 (Age 68) |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Christ Church (Oxford) |
| Children | 3 |
| Spouse | Sophia Carteret |
William Petty Fitzmaurice, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, known as the Earl of Shelburne between 1761 and 1784, by which title he is generally known to history, was an Anglo-Irish Whig statesman who was the first home secretary in 1782 and then prime minister in 1782–83. According to the EIR, he was instrumental in making a shadow government formally take charge of the official state apparatus. "Although he had formerly preferred to steer British politics from behind the scenes in his capacity as chairman of the three-man 'Secret Committee' of the East India Company, Shelburne felt compelled to briefly take the formal reins of government in order to ensure the launching of his new British imperium."[1]
Activities
According to Jeffrey Steinberg writing in the Executive Intelligence Review, Lord Shelburne was instrumental in making a shadow government formally take charge of the official state apparatus:
At the very moment of his taking up with Bentham, Lord Shelburne was in the process of launching his most daring political intrigues. In June 1780, weary of the failed prosecution of the war in North America, and convinced that the ministry of Lord George North would bring eternal ruin to his dreams of permanent empire, Lord Shelburne, through the East India Company and its allied Baring Bank, bankrolled a Jacobin mob to descend upon London, ostensibly in protest over the granting of Irish reforms. The so-called Irish reforms amounted to little more than forced conscription of Irishmen into the British Army to fight in North America - a move Shelburne hoped would also defeat the pro-American republican movement inside Ireland that had nearly launched its own revolt against Britain in 1779.
Led by Lord George Gordon, the Protestant rabble stormed Westminster, sending parliamentarians and lords alike down flights of stairs, out windows, and to the hospitals. For eight days, London was ransacked, culminating in the storming of the Newgate Prison and the freeing of all the prisoners, who joined in the assault on the Parliament building.
Lord Shelburne, as head of the interior committee of the House of Lords, personally ensured the maximum terror by delaying the reading of the Riot Act (which would have called out the Home Guard) until violence had spread to every comer of the city. When the flames subsided, the ministry of Lord North was in ashes as well. North resigned as prime minister, and within months, Shelburne was himself in the new Rockingham cabinet as foreign secretary for the Northern District, subsuming the North American colonies. From that post, he would be the principal negotiator in Paris across the table from Benjamin Franklin. By this time also, King George III had declared himself wholly subservient to the Shelburne-led East India Company faction-the Venetian Party. As the result of these events, the shadow government formally took charge of the official state apparatus. The intelligence operations formerly housed at the East India Company were henceforth run out of the Foreign Ministry and the British Secret Intelligence Services (SIS). [1]
Even with matters still unresolved in North America, Shelburne and Bentham turned their attention to another critical front across the English Channel in France. The Seven Years' War of 1756-63 had stripped France of its once formidable maritime capacity. Shelburne now sought to destroy France as an economic and military rival on the continent. From the outset, the Jacobin Terror was a British East India Company-, British Foreign Office-orchestrated affair. The bloody massacre of France's scientific elite was systematically carried out by French hands, manning French guillotines, but guided by British strings.
Jacques Necker, a Geneva-born, Protestant, slavishly pro-British banker, had been installed through the efforts of Shelburne's leading ally in France, Philippe Duke of Orleans, as finance minister. Necker's daughter, the infamous Madame de Staël, would later run one of Shelburne's most important Parisian salons.
Although Necker had failed to block France from allying with the Americans during the American Revolution, he did succeed in presiding over the depletion of the French treasury and the collapse of its credit system. Economic crisis across France was the precondition for political chaos and insurrection, and Shelburne readied the projected destabilization by creating a "radical writers' shop" at Bowood staffed by Bentham, the Genevan Etienne Dumont, and the Englishman Samuel Romilly. Speeches were prepared by Bentham and translated and transported by diplomatic pouch and other means to Paris, where leaders of the Jacobin Terror, Jean-Paul Marat, Georges Jacques Danton, and Maximilien de Robespierre delivered the fiery oratories. Records of East India Company payments to these leading Jacobins are still on file at the British Museum.[1]
