In 1783, the King needed a fifth Prime Minister in two years. Despite others’ doubts, he turned to 24-year-old William Pitt, on this day, to turn the country around, writes Eliot Wilson

As 1783 drew to a close, Britain was on its fourth Prime Minister in two years. On 27 March 1782, Lord North had paid the price for losing the American colonies. Lieutenant General The Earl Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown had ended the fighting in North America, and the House of Commons went on to pass a motion to cease “further prosecution of offensive warfare on the continent of North America”. North treated it as a confidence matter and the government was defeated 234 to 215.

It took a month for North to persuade the King to accept his resignation. George III grudgingly invited the 51-year-old Whig grandee the Marquess of Rockingham, whom he disliked and who had previously been Prime Minister as long ago as 1765-66, to form a government. But 97 days later Rockingham died of influenza; he was replaced by the home secretary, the Earl of Shelburne, an unusually intellectual Anglo-Irish landowner whom the King liked little more than Rockingham.

Shelburne had been a critic of the war in America and an ally of William Pitt the Elder. His main task now was to agree a peace settlement with the new United States of America, and negotiations had been underway in Paris with an American........

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