William Pitt the Younger: A Biography

A study of the rise to power of the elder Pitt over the subsequent twenty years provides four main conclusions which assist in appreciating the career of his son. First, elections in the eighteenth century were not contested by organised political parties with a programme or manifesto. Although in the mid-eighteenth century many politicians could still be roughly categorised as Whig or Tory, even this distinction was breaking down. The opposition to the long-running Whig administrations would generally include dissident Whigs as well as a rump of Tories. In any case, most Members of Parliament had no wish to pursue a political career as such and were not elected to pursue any particular policy, many seeing their duty as one of supporting the King’s chosen Ministers unless they did something manifestly outrageous. As a result, politicians did not generally win power by campaigning at a general election and winning a majority for a specific programme, and nor did voters necessarily have the composition of the government foremost in their minds – no general election in the entire eighteenth century led directly to a change of government. There were really two routes into office: one was to be an ally of the Crown, or of someone who would inherit the crown in due course; the other was to make such a nuisance of oneself in Parliament that Ministers seeking a quiet life or a broad consensus would have to include the troublemaker in the government. The elder Pitt tried the first of these approaches for about ten years and then switched to the second, although by that time King George II was most reluctant to appoint him to anything. As Pelham, the leading Minister of the mid-1740s, wrote to Stephen Fox in 1746 on Pitt’s appointment as Paymaster General: ‘It is determined, since the King will not hear of Pitt’s being Secretary att [sic] War, that he shall be Paymaster … I don’t doubt but you will be surpris’d that Mr. Pitt should be thought on for so high and lucrative an employment; but he must be had, and kept.’8 There was never any love lost between Pitt and the other leading politicians of the day or between him and either of the kings he served. Each time he was appointed to the government it was because his speeches were too effective or his support too great to keep him out.

Second, while the power of Parliament was still tempered by the authority and patronage of the Crown, it was the only forum in which the politicians of the time engaged with each other and staked out their positions. As a result, prowess in parliamentary debate was a most valuable political skill. The elder Pitt could never have advanced to high office without such skill since he lacked both money and the patronage of the King. The second Earl Waldegrave, chief confidant of George II, wrote in his memoirs:

Mr. Pitt has the finest genius, improved by study and all the ornamental parts of classical learning … He has a peculiar clearness and facility of expression; and has an eye as significant as his words. He is not always a fair or conclusive reasoner, but commands the passions with sovereign authority; and to inflame or captivate a popular assembly is a consummate orator.9

Having finally thrown in his lot with King George II in 1746 in return for a place in the government, Pitt was happy to use his oratorical skills to advance arguments sometimes the exact opposite of those he had propagated in opposition, a phenomenon well known to this day. He had made his name in opposition denouncing the payment of subsidies for Hanoverian troops even to the point of saying he would agree to be branded on the forehead as a traitor if he ever supported the idea, but once in office he swiftly switched sides on the issue with ‘unembarrassed countenance’.10

It is a tragedy for historians that parliamentary proceedings at the time of the elder Pitt were not officially recorded. Indeed, it was expressly forbidden to publish speeches delivered in Parliament, since it was thought that this would lead to popular pressure interfering with the judgements of an independent Parliament. By the time of the younger Pitt these matters were treated very differently, but this restriction illustrates the limited role of public opinion in the British constitution of the mid-eighteenth century.

Third, while his long career encompassed a fair amount of opportunism and inconsistency, the elder Pitt undoubtedly developed and held to a broad philosophy of how Britain should operate in military and foreign affairs. Although he would have called himself a Whig, the term Tory being largely pejorative and still heavily associated with suspected Jacobite sympathies, Pitt was usually distinct in his views from the great figures of the Whig aristocracy. He was, for instance, much more likely than them to quote popular support as a factor in favour of his views, something that they would have looked on as the folly of the mob. Pitt’s views could be categorised as ‘Patriot’ or in ‘the Country Interest’, emphasising the views of a nation wider than the Whig oligarchy, and sometimes they were frankly Tory, such as opposing the existence of any significant standing army. Such opinions were associated with hostility to Continental entanglements and suspicion of the power of the Crown, two opinions woven together by the fact that the King was simultaneously but separately the ruler of Hanover.* Pitt believed in a maritime approach to foreign affairs, one which he brought to devastating fruition in the Seven Years’ War and set out at its simplest in the Commons in the 1740s:

I lay it down, Sir, as a certain maxim that we should never assist our allies upon the continent with any great number of troops. If we send our troops abroad, it should be rather with a view to improve them in the art of war, than to assist our allies … The only manner, therefore, in which we ought to support her [Austria] and our other allies upon the continent is with our money and our ships. My reason for laying this down as a maxim is, not only because the sea is our natural element, but because it is dangerous to our liberties and destructive to our trade to encourage great numbers of our people to depend for their livelihood upon the profession of arms … For this reason, we ought to maintain as few regular soldiers as possible, both at home and abroad. Another argument on this subject presents itself: our troops cost more to maintain them than those of any other country. Our money, therefore, will be of most service to our allies, because it will enable them to raise and support a greater number of troops than we can supply them with for the same sum.11

Throughout his career the elder Pitt emphasised the importance of overseas trade, an issue which regularly made him the darling of the City of London. To preserve and expand that trade, he believed in naval supremacy, the retention and expansion of the colonies, particularly in North America, and a firm stance against the Bourbon monarchies of France and Spain. Long after his death, elements of the same beliefs in trade and naval power would be discerned within the policies carried out by his son as Prime Minister.

Fourth, the elder Pitt cultivated a detachment from party as a healthy attribute in itself, along with a further detachment from the financial rewards and perquisites of office. Paymasters had traditionally made huge personal gains, usually by investing for their own account the balances of public money for which they were responsible, and taking a commission on foreign subsidies.* It was to the astonishment of other politicians and the delight of a wider public that on his appointment as Paymaster, Pitt lodged the balance of public money with the Bank of England and forwent his personal commission on a subsidy to Sardinia. It was as a result of such forbearance, as well as of his general political stance, that he was long regarded as different from other politicians, less corrupt and self-interested. Coupled with his apparent lack of interest in taking a title, this attribute led to him becoming known as ‘the Great Commoner’. It was also as a result of these sacrifices that his income rarely kept up with his lavish domestic expenditure. The huge debts which this produced seldom seemed to trouble him, a trait faithfully reproduced in his famous son.

The elder Pitt spent a large proportion of his life visibly ill. He suffered from a wide range of ailments, all of which were then associated with gout; he was frequently lame and also suffered from ‘gout in the bowels’ and similar disorders. For him to give a speech in the Commons with a walking stick and a large part of his body wrapped in flannels was not uncommon. He would often retreat to his bed even at times of crisis, as this anecdote from the time of the Seven Years’ War demonstrates:

Mr. Pitt’s plan, when he had the gout, was to have no fire in his room, but to load himself with bedclothes. At his house at Hayes he slept in a long room; at one end of which was his bed, and his lady’s at the other. His way was, when he thought the Duke of Newcastle had fallen into any mistake to send for him and read him a lecture. The Duke was sent for once and came when Mr. Pitt was confined to bed by the gout. There was, as usual, no fire in the room; the day was very chilly and the Duke, as usual, afraid of catching cold. The Duke first sat down on Mrs Pitt’s bed, as the warmest place; then drew up his legs into it, as he got colder. The lecture unluckily continuing a considerable time, the Duke at length fairly lodged himself under Mrs Pitt’s bed clothes. A person, from whom I had the story, suddenly going in, saw the two ministers in bed, at the two ends of the room, while Pitt’s long nose and black beard unshaved for some days, added to the grotesqueness of the scene.12

In 1760, the accession of George III, grandson of George II (and son of Prince Frederick, who after years of plotting for his accession with opposition figures, spoiled every calculation by dying before his father), set in motion a chain of events which led to Pitt’s departure from government. Favouring a more hardline approach to Spain than his colleagues would accept, Pitt wished to continue in office only on the basis of assured control of the government, an ambition irreconcilable with the new King’s advancement of his great favourite, the Earl of Bute.

Pitt left office at loggerheads with his colleagues but as a towering figure in public repute, which the King and Bute recognised by conferring on him and his descendants an annuity of £3,000 a year. Bute also tried to undermine Pitt’s reputation by unusually making the details of the annuity public. Pitt complained that ‘the cause and manner of my resigning’ had been ‘grossly misrepresented’. He had been ‘infamously traduced as a bargain for my forsaking the public’.13 As part of the same package a title was given to Pitt’s wife, who became Baroness Chatham. For the moment, Pitt himself chose to stay in his arena of greatest influence, the Commons, rather than go to the Lords. Out of office he could now bestow more attention on his devoted wife and five children, including William, now two years old.

However many wise decisions were taken by the elder Pitt in the Seven Years’ War, few compared in wisdom to his decision a few years earlier in 1754 to marry Lady Hester Grenville. Pitt was still unmarried at the age of forty-six. His most consistent and affectionate friendship had been with his sister Ann, although he reported falling in love with a French woman during his tour of the Continent. On the face of it, his decision to get married at that age, to someone he had known for years without apparently showing any previous romantic interest in her, seems sudden and strange. Pitt had one eye on posterity: it may simply be that he woke up one morning realising that if he did not find a wife and produce a family now he never would.

In any event, it was a marriage of great and enduring strength, supported by deep mutual affection. Hester proved utterly devoted to this difficult and often sick man, describing herself in early letters as ‘ever unalterably your most passionately loving wife’. She was thirty-three at the time of their marriage and herself came from a powerful political family. Her uncle was the Lord Cobham with whom Pitt had intrigued twenty years before, and her brothers were highly active in politics, including both Richard, Earl Temple and George Grenville. The two families were already related because Pitt’s elder brother Thomas had married Hester’s cousin, but much has always been made of the strikingly different characters of the Pitts and the Grenvilles. Where the Pitts were demonstrative, emotional and argumentative, the Grenvilles were cool, methodical and loyal. Pitts had a spirit of adventure, Grenvilles an inclination to caution. And where Pitts enjoyed foreign and military matters in politics, Grenvilles were more at home with finance and administration. The seemingly better-balanced personality of the younger William Pitt is often ascribed to the fortuitous combination of these contrasting traits, although one of his biographers has commented: ‘In the son – still more in the other children – was a full measure of the Grenville starchiness, which unhappily dulled the Pitt fire and brilliance.’14 Most other commentators have concluded that alongside a brilliant and impetuous father, the younger Pitt was fortunate indeed to have a mother who had resilience, a calm temperament and an unfailing sense of duty.

In 1755 the elder Pitt purchased Hayes Place in what would now be south London, near the village of Bromley. Although in time he would regard it as only a modest residence it had twenty-four bedrooms, elegant gardens and several hundred acres of pasture and woodland. In 1765, with his fame and reputation at their height, he had the immense good fortune to inherit a large estate, Burton Pynsent in Somerset, from an admirer, Sir William Pynsent, whom he seems never to have met. Excited by the prospect of living on a far grander scale than was possible at Hayes, Pitt soon fought off the descendants of the deceased who tried to dispute the will, and set about vast alterations and landscaping. This included a 140-foot-high column in memory of Pynsent, raised as a token of humble thanks. The scale of these changes, in addition to the cost of selling Hayes and then repurchasing it at a higher price (he discovered he could not do without a large residence close to London), plunged Pitt into debts which remained with him for the rest of his life. One of the many inestimable services performed by Hester was to bring more careful management to the family’s finances and to prevent further extravagances so that the debts did not become completely unsustainable.

The young William Pitt was born at Hayes in May 1759 ‘after a labour rather severe’,15 the fourth child in five years after Hester, John, and Harriot. The fifth and final child, James, was born two years later. These five children born within six years of each other made a great deal of noise: ‘The young ones are so delightfully noisy that I hardly know what I write,’16 wrote Pitt to his wife when she went to visit her own family. He seems to have taken the precaution of making alterations to the house at Hayes so that he could cut himself off, when he wished, from the sound and presence of his children.

It is clear that William soon emerged as a notably bright child and a particular favourite of both mother and father. Hester wrote within a few weeks of his birth: ‘I cannot help believing that little William is to become a personage.’17 Although there would have been many servants in the household, the children received a good deal of attention from their father after he left office in 1761. They grew up in a very comfortable home, decidedly rural in a well-ordered sort of way. The young children rode, bathed, went birdnesting and explored the countryside first around Hayes and then around Burton Pynsent. Some of these things stuck: the younger Pitt rode regularly for exercise throughout his life, and inherited from his father a love of landscape gardening for relaxation; but even in his earliest years he did not put outdoor pursuits at the top of his list. He showed early on a sharp intellect, highly advanced powers of speech and memory, and a clear interest in public affairs. All these attributes were cultivated constantly by his father.

Inevitably, there are plenty of stories in which visitors to the Pitt household claim prescience about the child’s future greatness. Lady Holland, mother of Charles James Fox, is meant to have said, ‘I have been this morning with Lady Hester Pitt, and there is little William Pitt, not eight years old and really the cleverest child I ever saw; and brought up so strictly and so proper in his behaviour, that, mark my words, that little boy will be a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives.’18 Other reports include the young William standing up on a mounting block and addressing the trees as if they were Members of the House of Commons. Such stories may be fanciful, but the essential point, that he was extraordinarily well versed in politics and philosophy at a remarkably early age, certainly stands up to examination. Family correspondence refers to him as ‘the Philosopher’, ‘the Young Senator’, ‘Eager Mr. William’ and ‘Impetuous William’. In 1766, when he was seven, his tutor wrote of him and his sister:

Lady Hester and Mr. Pitt still continue to surprise and astonish as much as ever; and I see no possibility of diminishing their ardour either by too much business or too much relaxation. When I am alone reading, Mr. Pitt, if it is any thing he may attend to, constantly places himself by me, where his steady attention and sage remarks are not only entertaining but useful; as they frequently throw a light upon the subject, and strongly impress it on my memory.19

The same tutor, Edward Wilson, who taught all the Pitt children at home because of their father’s unforgiving recollections of public school, marvelled on another occasion that William ‘seemed never to learn but merely to recollect’.20 At the age of seven he was able to write letters in Latin to his father, and also did so in English in a rather pompous and wordy style. With his father delivering thundering orations against the Stamp Act in the Commons in early 1766, William showed an insatiable appetite for political news. ‘I expect many sage reflections from William upon the public papers,’ his father wrote to his mother, and later that year, with a peerage for the elder Pitt in prospect, William commented that he was glad he was not the eldest son, because ‘he could serve his country in the House of Commons like his Papa’.21

A seven-year-old with such attitudes and interests in our own times would probably find them beaten out of him at school, and indeed that could as easily have happened in the 1760s. William had the advantage of mixing almost exclusively with his own siblings, his tutor and adult family members, most of whom encouraged his political interest. The poet William Hayley reported when William was a boy of fourteen that he ‘eclipsed his brother in conversation’.22 It is hard to think that he was not sometimes an irritation to his brothers and sisters; as the historian J. Holland Rose commented, ‘the boy … narrowly escaped being a prodigy of priggishness’.23 His narrow escape seems to have been made possible by an easygoing disposition and pleasant temperament, which made it easier for him to win friends in a small circle. He was also a rather sickly child, with frequently recurring problems in the nose and throat, and many coughs and colds. His fragility probably helped the other children to put up with his bookish ways.

Father and son showed a deep attachment to each other. ‘If I should smoke,’ the elder Pitt wrote, ‘William would instantly call for a pipe.’24 He would in later years describe William as ‘the hope and comfort of my life’.25 In 1772, when Hester took the three eldest children to Hayes and left William and his younger brother with their father at Burton Pynsent, the elder Pitt wrote:

My dearest life will read with joy that the boys go on well. I believe William’s sequestration, as he learnedly terms it, agrees better with his contemplative constitution than more talk and more romps. Airing, literature, the arts, tea-table, sober whist and lecturing Papa for staying out too late, together with the small amusement of devouring a joint of mutton, or so, before I can look about, make up our daily occupations.26

His wife replied: ‘I do not in the least wonder that the style of William’s present life agrees with him. It is certainly not better suited to the state of his constitution, than to the fineness of his mind, which makes him enjoy with the highest pleasure what would be above the reach of any other creature of his small age.’27

In 1772 William even wrote a play, performed by the Pitt children, which was wholly political in content and eerily foreshadowed the Regency crisis in which he would play the real lead role seventeen years later. It is obvious that he showed academic gifts and political interest from an exceptionally early age, encouraged and nurtured by the adults around him, and that he enjoyed a pleasant and sheltered upbringing in the midst of a loving family. In all these respects he was very fortunate, but he was not unique. There must have been something more to his formative years, even before he went to university at the age of fourteen, to equip him to carry out the functions of Prime Minister at the age of twenty-four.

There were at least three factors which, in the formation of the young William Pitt’s personality and opinions, were not only fortunate but truly unique. The first was that a father who had himself dominated the House of Commons and presided over a government took an active, usually daily, role in his education. At no other time in British history has the head of one administration acted as the tutor of another. A home education seems to have been well suited in any case to a child of William’s temperament and health, but Mr Wilson’s tuition was frequently supplemented by the ministrations of the elder Pitt. Bishop Tomline, in his surprisingly uninformative biography of the younger Pitt written shortly after his death, reports that ‘when his lordship’s health would permit, he never suffered a day to pass without giving instruction of some sort to his children; and seldom without reading a chapter of the Bible with them’.28 While the elder Pitt seems to have been attentive to all his children, he particularly enjoyed passing on to William examples of eloquence from contemporary or classical writers and speakers, and asking him to study them. He taught him to speak in a clear and melodious voice by making him recite each day passages from the best English poets, particularly Shakespeare and Milton. Another biographer of the younger Pitt, Lord Stanhope, wrote the following with the advantage of his father having spoken to Pitt himself:

My father had the honour to be connected in relationship with that great man – and, as such, he had the privilege of being in the house with him sometimes for many weeks together. Presuming on that familiar intercourse, he told me, he ventured on one occasion to ask Mr. Pitt by what means – by what course of study – he had acquired that admirable readiness of speech – that aptness of finding the right word without pause or hesitation. Mr. Pitt replied that whatever readiness he might be thought to possess in that respect, he believed that he derived it very much from a practice his father – the great Lord Chatham – had recommended to him. Lord Chatham had bid him take up any book in some foreign language with which he was well acquainted, in Latin, Greek, or French, for example. Lord Chatham then enjoined him to read out of this work into English, stopping where he was not sure of the word to be used in English, until the right word came to his mind, and then proceed. Mr. Pitt states that he had assiduously followed this practice. At first he had often to stop for a while before he could recollect the proper word, but he found the difficulties gradually disappear, until what was a toil to him at first became at last an easy and familiar task.29

By the time he arrived at Cambridge in 1773, William could apparently read into English six or seven pages of Thucydides, without previous study of it and with barely a mistake. He may have been educated at home but he had in effect attended a master school in the use of language and its delivery. In addition he showed a strong early aptitude for mathematics. Uninhibited by peer pressure and required from the outset to meet adult standards, he developed early on a highly unusual ability to speak clearly, structure an argument, and think on his feet.