William Pitt the Younger King refused to support him. Fox stated the bill was necessary to save the company from bankruptcy. Pitt responded that: "Necessity was the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It was the argument of tyrants; it was the creed of slaves." The King was opposed to the bill; when it passed in the House of Commons, he secured its defeat in the House of Lords by threatening to regard anyone who voted for it as his enemy. Following the bill's failure in the Upper House, George III dismissed the coalition government and finally entrusted the premiership to William Pitt,
William Pitt the Younger 1798 after having spent 4 million pounds (a sum roughly equal to about £224,120,000.00 in today's money) and having lost about 100,000 dead or men crippled for life over the preceding five years, due mostly to yellow fever, achieving nothing. The British historian Sir John William Fortescue wrote that Pitt and his cabinet had tried to destroy French power "in these pestilent islands ... only to discover, when it was too late, that they practically destroyed the British army". Fortescue concluded that Pitt's attempt to add St. Domingue to the British empire had killed off most of the British army,