William Pitt the Younger: A Biography

Pitt’s Cambridge friends, then, provided lively company and intellectual stimulation, and while not subject to many vices undoubtedly drank a good deal of port together. They were, however, all of a type, generally the sons of noblemen, and all familiar with politics and classics. Pitt was friendly and charming in their company, but he gained no experience in dealing with other types of people in other situations. The latitudinarian and Newtonian influences on Cambridge at the time emphasised the power of reason, and Pitt would have met far fewer people who were impervious to rational persuasion than would have been the case elsewhere.

He would have encountered very few women indeed, and certainly none at all on equal terms or in any intellectual environment. Nor did he have to cope with the company of people not of his choosing. It may have been because of his Grenville starchiness or it may partly have been the result of his education in the cloistered atmosphere of his home and college that Pitt was to be known throughout his life as aloof, difficult and sometimes haughty towards most people he met. The pattern of his character was now set: a brilliant and tireless interest in practical questions, a tremendously relaxed and talkative enjoyment of chosen company, and a stern face presented to the outer world.

Outside the college dining rooms inhabited by Pitt and his friends, life in the city of Cambridge would have looked and sounded very much as it had done for many decades. The first paved street in the city appeared in 1788, some years after Pitt left Pembroke, and gas lighting did not follow until 1823, well after his death. Yet as the 1770s drew to a close the Britain beyond the walls of Oxbridge colleges was on the brink of a social and economic transformation which even the brilliant Cambridge graduates gathering to discuss public affairs could not possibly have foreseen. In the coming years they would have to respond to it, and their lives and careers would be increasingly shaped and buffeted by it.

War has always been a spur to invention, and the Seven Years’ War was no exception. The invention of the spinning jenny in 1764 and improvements upon it in the following years brought about a revolution in the cotton industry and British manufacturing. That revolution gathered pace as Pitt studied his books at Cambridge, and was to become a mighty engine of economic growth throughout his political career. Cotton exports from Britain were £200,000 in 1764, and had risen to £355,000 by 1780, but had rocketed to £9,753,000 by the time of Pitt’s death in 1806, going on to form nearly half of total British exports.19

The use of coal and coke in iron production was also getting under way, further transformed by the use of steam engines and blast furnaces from 1790. This was the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and it would bring huge changes in the demography of Britain. By 1800, the great cities of manufacturing and trade such as Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds and Bristol would dwarf the previously largest cities (other than London) such as Norwich, Exeter and York. London was, and would remain, the largest city in the British Isles, but at the end of the eighteenth century many of what are today its central districts were still villages surrounded by fields. A German visitor, Carl Moritz, wrote of the view from the top of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1782: ‘beneath me lay a packed mass of towers, houses and palaces, with the London squares – their green lawns in their midst – adding pleasant splashes of colour in between. At one end of the Thames stood the Tower of London, like a city with a forest of masts behind it; at the other lay Westminster Abbey lifting up its towers. The green hills skirting the Paddington and Islington districts smiled at me from afar while nearer by lay Southwark on the opposite bank of the Thames.’20 At this stage St James’s Park was ‘nothing more than a semi-circular avenue of trees enclosing a large area of greensward in the midst of which is a swampy pond. Cows feed on the turf and you may buy their milk quite freshly drawn from the animal.’21*

We do not know whether the future politicians gathered around the young Pitt discussed the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, but the ingredients were present all around them. Agricultural productivity was rising much faster than in neighbouring France, as farm sizes increased and the population began to move to the cities. Coal output in 1775 was already nearly three times what it had been in 1700. The growth of the cotton industry and trade with the expanding Empire provided new employment on a huge scale. Population growth, facilitated by the availability of food and work, started to accelerate, with the population of England growing from five and a half million to seven million between 1751 and 1781. By 1841 it would reach fifteen million.22 The transport system was beginning to improve, with the canals undergoing expansion to link manufacturing centres and ports, and turnpike roads growing rapidly from 1750 onwards.

The huge expansion and movements of population would create immense political and social strains, but at the time of Pitt’s Cambridge education these trends had yet to gather their full momentum. It would undoubtedly have seemed in the 1770s that such changes as were happening could be safely accommodated within the existing political and economic order. The real explosion of agricultural and manufacturing production and export growth took place after 1780, just as Pitt entered Parliament, when in a twenty-year period the proportion of national output exported rose from 9 per cent to 16 per cent even while a war of unprecedented intensity was raging. Pitt and his colleagues in government would face the challenge of coping with economic change on a scale never witnessed before, and at a time when that change was unpredictable and uneven. They would also be the last generation to conduct the business of the nation without the advantage of the dramatic advances in travel and communications which were also on the way.

Although Pitt, on his increasing forays to the capital, would find it possible in the late 1770s to eat breakfast in London and dinner (generally taken in the late afternoon) in Cambridge, road travel was still an arduous business. It was not practical at this time, nor would it be for some decades, to make a tour even of a country as small as England without spending weeks or months doing so and being incommunicado for part of the time. As a result, Pitt in office would rarely stray north of Northampton or west of Weymouth. When William Wilberforce rushed to a crisis public meeting in York in 1795, taking less than forty-eight hours to make the journey from Westminster, it was regarded as an extraordinary achievement, made possible only by extra teams of horses as well as outriders to clear people from the last twenty miles of the route. Within fifty years, he could have done it in nine hours on the train. The fact that advances in communications came later than a great deal of other economic change would limit the ability of politicians to understand what was happening and to respond to it quickly.

Throughout the whole of this period all orders and correspondence dealing with a burgeoning national economy and war on a global scale would have to be conveyed by letter carried by a despatch rider on a horse, or on board ship. The complications this entailed for international diplomacy would be unimaginable today. Wars could be declared while peace proposals were still on their way from a foreign capital. A message sent by sea did not necessarily travel faster than a fleet. In 1762, when the Seven Years’ War widened into conflict between Britain and Spain, the enterprising British Admiralty sent a message to British forces in India to set off immediately to attack the Spanish colony in Manila in the Philippines. Arriving seven months after the original message had been sent from London, the British achieved the ultimate surprise attack, since word had still not arrived from Madrid that war had been declared at all. Their ships sailed under the Spanish defenders’ guns unchallenged before launching their successful assault. In the Nootka Sound crisis of 1790, the interval between events on the ground on the west coast of North America and a response from London could be anything up to a full year. It is therefore vital to remember that governments of this period, including Pitt’s administrations, were often groping in the dark when dealing with war or disorder, guessing at events, and trying to remember to err on the side of caution. This would not help them to cope with the convulsions which would shake the world in their lifetimes.

The first of these convulsions, and one which ranked high in the conversations of Pitt and his friends, was already taking place in the 1770s. In 1775 the diverging interests of Britain and the thirteen American colonies exploded into war, and Pitt’s letters of the time are peppered with requests for news, information and documents relating to it. The repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 had made Chatham a hero across the Atlantic, with statues of him erected in American towns, but ironically it was Chatham’s own victories that paved the way for this further and disastrous conflict. With the French cleared from Canada, the colonies had much less need of Britain to protect them. Instead, they found British commitments to Indian tribes getting in the way of the territorial expansion to the west which a rapidly growing American population now sought. And the emerging British Empire was now so vast and varied that the interests of one colony could be entirely different from the interests of the whole. When the British government reduced the duties on the export of tea to North America, it was meant to be excellent news for the troubled finances of the East India Company, but it was disastrous for the lucrative smuggling trade in Massachusetts. The result was the Boston Tea Party and, several years later, open conflict.

British political opinion was deeply divided over the developing war in America, but few in London would have doubted the capacity of Britain to bring the recalcitrant colonies to heel. The 350 ships and 25,000 soldiers assembled in America by the early summer of 1776 in the name of the King constituted an awesome display of military power. Yet they were to find, like the Americans themselves two centuries later in Vietnam, that regular troops fighting by conventional methods in vast, impenetrable terrain could win most of the battles but still not win the war.

Chatham, in his dying years, and after some time in which he took no part in politics, made three celebrated visits to the House of Lords to thunder against the folly of British policy. As Macaulay put it in his brilliant essay on Pitt, ‘Chatham was only the ruin of [the elder] Pitt, but an awful and majestic ruin, not to be contemplated by any man of sense and feeling without emotions resembling those which are excited by the remains of the Parthenon and of the Colosseum.’23 In 1775 he called for conciliation of the colonies: ‘We shall be forced ultimately to retract; let us retract while we can not when we must.’ His son sat transfixed in the Gallery of the Lords, and his letter to his mother shows how he was now applying his judgement of classical speeches to contemporary debaters:

Nothing prevented his [Chatham’s] speech from being the most forcible that can be imagined … The matter and manner both were striking; far beyond what I can express … Lord Suffolk, I cannot say answered him … He was a contemptible orator indeed, with paltry matter and a whining delivery. Lord Shelburne spoke well … Lord Camden was supreme … Lord Rockingham spoke shortly but sensibly; and the Duke of Richmond well … Upon the whole, it was a noble debate.24

On the second occasion, Chatham presciently warned that the war would soon widen into conflict with France and Spain, insisting on the need to make immediate peace with America. Once again, an excited son was in the Gallery:

I cannot help expressing to you how happy beyond description I feel in reflecting that my father was able to exert, in their full vigour, the sentiments and eloquence which have always distinguished him. His first speech took up half an hour, and was full of all his usual force and vivacity … He spoke a second time … This he did in a flow of eloquence, and with a beauty of expression, animated and striking beyond conception.25

Chatham’s warnings went unheeded; strategic mistakes contributed to a serious British defeat at Saratoga, followed by rejoicing in Paris and the entry of France and later Spain and Holland into the war. The tired and dispirited head of the government, Lord North, asked George III for permission to resign and to sound out Chatham on the terms on which he would form a government. Not only did the King refuse, referring to Chatham as that ‘perfidious man’, but Chatham was now on his last legs. Against the advice of his doctors, he went to the House of Lords on 17 April 1778, entering the Chamber supported on the shoulders of William and his son-in-law, Lord Mahon. Dramatically, the entire House of Lords rose to greet him. It is hard to imagine that William Pitt ever forgot the poignancy of this moment and its illustration of the greatness of his father. Chatham’s voice was weak, and he was almost unable to stand; at times his speech wandered, but his message was clear: now the war had been widened it was too late to sue for peace. ‘Shall this great kingdom … fall prostrate before the House of Bourbon? … Shall a people that fifteen years ago was the terror of the world now stoop so low as to tell its ancient inveterate enemy, “Take all we have, only give us peace”. In God’s name … Let us at least make one effort; and if we must fall, let us fall like men!’26 He sat down exhausted, and trying to rise to speak for a second time, fell backwards unable to do any more, a moment immortalised in Copley’s famous painting, as his sons John and William rushed to his aid. He was taken to Downing Street, then two days later to Hayes, and died on 11 May. The role of chief mourner at his father’s funeral the following month became Pitt’s first public duty.

The following month left Britain facing the growing prospect of defeat abroad and deeper divisions at home. The war with the colonies had been bluntly opposed not only by Chatham but by the main body of the Whig opposition under the Marquis of Rockingham. Many British officers, John Pitt among them, had refused to serve in the American campaigns. They were, however, happy to fight the Bourbons, and John Pitt was now despatched on the expedition to Gibraltar. By 1779 the French and Spanish fleets were cruising unmolested in the English Channel, the Royal Navy too weak and dispersed to fight them, and their waste washed ashore on the south-coast beaches of a humiliated Britain. When efforts to clear the Channel of the enemy failed, the government brought to court martial the naval commander Admiral Keppel, a leading Whig: this move backfired badly on them when Keppel was acquitted and the government was shown to have been seriously incompetent in equipping the navy for war. The opposition, the young Pitt among them, rejoiced. As crowds broke the windows of senior Ministers, Pitt wrote to Edward Eliot a letter which reveals his partisanship and his dry humour with friends:

I am just come from beyond the Throne in the House of Lords … The short Interval between the duties of a Statesman and a Beau, allows me just Time to perform that of a good Correspondent … I rejoice to hear that the good People of England have so universally exerted their natural Right of Breaking Windows, Picking Pockets etc. etc., and that these Constitutional demonstrations of Joy, are not confined to the Metropolis … The Conquering Hero himself has this evening made his Entry and every Window in London (a Metaphor I learnt in the House of Lords) is by this time acquainted with his Arrival … I begin to fear that the Clamour may subside, and the King still be Blest with his present faithful Servants. Most sincerely and illegibly Yours W. Pitt.27

As Pitt prepared to leave Cambridge that year, opposition to the government of Lord North and to the King’s policies was in full cry, along with a widespread feeling that the political system was failing. Chatham had been followed by two weak Prime Ministers, the Duke of Grafton and Lord North, who had easily been dominated by the King. People beyond the ranks of the normal opposition began to accept that there was too much power vested in the Crown, too many placemen in key offices, too little competence in government, too little attention to the efficiency and effectiveness of the navy, too much waste of government money, and too little representation of large parts of the population. Early in 1780 there was uproar in the Commons as the opposition succeeded in carrying a motion that ‘the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished’.

The efforts of John Wilkes in the 1760s had helped to ignite radical and irreverent opinion. After Chatham’s departure from government in 1761 Wilkes had brought out a regular publication, the North Briton, which heaped insults on the Earl of Bute and the Royal Family. Outlawed, he eventually stood for Parliament in Middlesex, which had a wide franchise, and was repeatedly re-elected and repeatedly expelled by the Commons. The cry of ‘Wilkes and liberty’ had become a popular chant.

Spurred on by Edmund Burke, who coupled his passionate belief in tradition and monarchy with relentless criticism of the excesses of governments, opposition figures responded to this discontent by calling for ‘economical reform’ and ‘parliamentary reform’, and Pitt was to become an early devotee of both. Economical reform was directed at the patronage and alleged corruption of the system of offices surrounding the Crown. The objectives of its proponents were to reduce the number of sinecures and Crown offices, and to disqualify various placemen and contractors from being elected to the House of Commons while they were dependent on the patronage of the King. This programme was put forward by the Rockingham Whigs as a means of reversing the growth of the Crown’s power under Grafton and North. Parliamentary reform was supported more enthusiastically outside Parliament, largely by the growing middle class in the newly expanding cities who sought in various ways to redistribute the parliamentary seats, which were now completely adrift from the distribution of the population. Cornwall, for instance, had forty-four Members of Parliament, while the far greater population of London had ten.

The politicians of the time who put forward these reforms did not envisage that they were embarking on a long-term programme of political change. Their intention was to restore balance to what they regarded as a near-perfect constitutional settlement, arrived at in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when William III and Mary replaced the fleeing James II. That settlement involved the ultimate supremacy of Parliament, a guaranteed Protestant succession to the Crown, and religious tolerance for all Protestants, even though Dissenters were still barred from political office. It was credited with maintaining a stability within Britain unheard of in previous centuries, and it had been achieved without bloodshed, unlike the overthrow of the monarchy in the English Civil War. It kept both the Crown and a wider democracy in check. To the Whigs of the late eighteenth century the need was to correct its balance rather than to rebuild it. Parliamentary reform received the backing of Chatham in his final years, and Pitt would start his career holding to these views, calling for both economical and parliamentary reform, a position true to the views of his father and the fashions of the time.

No student of history should underestimate the influence of the Glorious Revolution on the politicians of a century later. It was the basis of the country’s political framework, and many MPs would continue to vote against any alteration of constituency boundaries right up to 1832 in the belief that such a perfect settlement should not be violated in any respect. But it was also the basis of the country’s religious framework, and it is impossible to understand the politics of the eighteenth century without an appreciation of the role of religion in national life.

The Cambridge University attended by Pitt was not open to Roman Catholics, and served as a seminary for the Anglican clergy. We have seen how Pitt attended chapel twice a day in his early years at Pembroke. This was not because he was religious in feeling, but because religion was deeply interwoven with politics, custom and national outlook. Indeed, it was commonplace in society, as the debauched lives of many politicians demonstrated, to be irreligious in private while adhering unfailingly to the religious settlement inherent in 1688. The reason people felt strongly about religious questions was not in the main because they cared about the niceties of theological debates – any more than Henry VIII left the Church for theological rather than personal and political reasons – but because religion had come to symbolise the constitution of the country and its foreign policy.

Britain had fought endless wars by the end of the eighteenth century against His Most Christian Majesty the King of France, with the Stuart Kings of the seventeenth century having been suspiciously close, through the Catholic Church, to England’s historic foe. James II, whose behaviour precipitated the 1688 Revolution, even privately apologised to Louis XIV for summoning a Parliament without his permission.28 Protestant Huguenots had fled to England from Catholic persecution in France, and it was Charles I’s attempts to plan a comeback with Catholics in Scotland and Ireland that had led to the second stage of the Civil War in the 1640s and to Cromwell’s merciless destruction of Catholic power in Ireland. In more recent memory, in both 1715 and 1745–46, Jacobite attempts to restore the Stuarts to the throne in place of the Hanoverians had been assisted by Catholic powers, specifically France and Spain. To the great majority of people in England it was therefore unthinkable to allow Catholics to hold office. Far beyond the Church and Parliament, Catholicism meant to most people treachery and invasion, bloodshed and persecution. Any acceptance that Catholics could have the rights and privileges of other Englishmen was therefore pandering to foreigners – in particular the French – returning to Jacobite sympathies and destroying a fundamental attribute of Englishness.

Just as the collapse of the Soviet Union two centuries later led to changes in political attitudes in the countries that had stood guard against it, so the collapse of the Jacobite threat after 1745 led to a steady breaking down of the political and religious battle lines in the late eighteenth century. Fear of the Jacobites had kept the suspect Tories out of office for a generation, and the Whigs, who prided themselves on the 1688 settlement, were permanently in power from 1714 to the 1760s. Now that party system had broken down, with parliamentary factions forming and re-forming, able to hold office in many combinations and putting leading Whigs out of office in the 1770s. To politicians the religious prohibitions were breaking down too, and many saw a need to amend the absolutism of the constitutional hostility to Roman Catholics. The conquest of Canada had brought vast numbers of Catholics of French descent into the British Empire. The Quebec Act of 1774 officially recognised the toleration of their religion. Added to that, the war in America made it essential to recruit soldiers who were Catholics, leading Parliament in 1778 to end the practice of requiring recruits to take an oath denying the supremacy of the Pope.

Beyond Westminster, many people who did not appreciate the need for such changes were suspicious of the motives behind them. Such suspicion was political dynamite, and it was accidentally detonated in the summer of 1780 by Lord George Gordon, leader of the Protestant Association. His attempt to take a petition to Parliament calling for the repeal of the 1778 Act resulted in a crowd of 60,000 forming across the river from the Palace of Westminster, siege being laid to Members of Parliament, and then five days and nights of perhaps the worst rioting London had ever experienced. Order was only restored after resolute action by the King, and the calling in of 15,000 troops and militia. Many hundreds of people were killed and scores of London’s most prized residences destroyed in untold scenes of savagery and destruction. Pitt, in his rooms at Lincoln’s Inn, was in the centre of it, apparently free from danger but witnessing London in flames in all directions. With the relaxed humour that was becoming his trademark he wrote to his mother: ‘Several very respectable lawyers have appeared with musquets on their shoulders, to the no small diversion of all spectators. Unluckily the Appearance of Danger ended just as we embodied, and our military Ardour has been thrown away.’29 He could not have failed to notice, however, the huge power of religious issues, and the dangers of letting popular feelings run out of control. As he contemplated the end of what he called the ‘placid uniformity’ of Cambridge life, and the start of a political career, he was learning that great issues were at stake – of war and peace, of monarchical or parliamentary power, of the rights of religious minorities, and of how to administer and control a society changing unpredictably at home and suffering military humiliation abroad. It was a dramatic and exciting time to enter politics. If he was to have any influence on it, he needed a career, he needed money, and he needed a seat in Parliament.