William Pitt the Younger however, was comfortable with Shelburne, and thus joined his government; he was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. Fox, who became Pitt's lifelong political rival, then joined a coalition with Lord North, with whom he collaborated to bring about the defeat of the Shelburne administration. When Lord Shelburne resigned in 1783, King George III, who despised Fox, offered to appoint Pitt to the office of prime minister. But Pitt wisely declined, for he knew he would be incapable of securing the support of the House of Commons. The Fox–North coalition rose to power in a government nominally headed by William Cavendish-Bentinck,
William Pitt the Younger when spies for the government were lurking everywhere, which captures well the tense, paranoid atmosphere of the 1790s when people were being encouraged to report "radicals" to the authorities. In 1793, Pitt decided to take advantage of a slave revolt in the French colony of St. Domingue (modern Haiti) to seize the richest French colony in the world, believing this was would strike a great blow at France while bringing St. Domingue into the British Empire and ensuring the slaves in the British West Indies would not be inspired to likewise revolt. Many of those who owned slave plantations in