The Younger Pitt

Michael Duffy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317899624
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del siglo XIX

The Younger Pitt was a phenomenon: dead at 46, he was not only Britain's youngest but also the second longest-serving Prime Minister to date, acting as premier for 19 of his 25 years in Parliament. In examining this astonishing career, this incisive Profile focuses on the means by which Pitt gained and maintained his hold on power. It provides new information on Pitt's relations with the strong-willed George III; on the nature of his ascendancy over his cabinet colleagues; his management of Parliament; his skill as a manipulator of public opinion; his role in Britain's international resurgence after the loss of America; and, of course, on the long struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.

Chapter 1

‘SUPERIOR EVEN TO
CHARLES FOX’:
THE SHORT PATH
TO POWER

. . .

GREAT CHATHAM’S SON

In any reckoning of British politics and government the rapidity of William Pitt the Younger’s rise to power is unique and will probably remain so. On 28 May 1780 he came of age on his twenty-first birthday. Within seven months he was elected a Member of Parliament; within two years and two months he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and a member of the Cabinet; within three years and seven months he was First Lord of the Treasury and leader of the government.

The least astonishing part of this extraordinary progression was his election to the House of Commons at such an early age. The unreformed eighteenth-century electoral system gave youth its chance. One in six of all members of the Commons which Pitt entered were under the age of thirty, though few were as young as he. Entrance was available if the youth could find a patron with a predominant influence over a parliamentary seat, either through family or political connection or by having a famous father with whose reflected glory a patron would wish to be associated. The Younger Pitt fell into the latter category. He was the second son of the great Earl of Chatham (William Pitt the Elder) who had been the most dazzling and turbulent political comet of the mideighteenth century. His inspirational leadership had helped guide the nation to victory in its most successful war – the Seven Years War (1756–63). William Pitt the Younger was born in the so-called Year of Victories of 1759 when his father’s fame stood at its zenith.

As influential on him as this success, however, was the fact that the Younger Pitt grew up amidst the decline of his father’s reputation. The Elder Pitt stood as a Patriot statesman, acting disinterestedly for the national good, independent of party rancour or faction, and hostile to all forms of mismanagement resulting from the corruption and jobbery of eighteenth-century politics. He was the enemy of aristocratic domination of the House of Commons and of titles, pensions and sinecures offered by governments to win their majorities. But by 1768 he was being assailed in publications such as the anonymous Essay on Patriotism, which introduces this book, denouncing him as a ‘patriotic imposter’. He was alleged to have put pride before service to his country by resigning in 1761, when his Cabinet colleagues would not approve his plans for war with Spain, and refusing support for their subsequent conduct of the war. His reputation as the incorrupt ‘Great Commoner’ was severely shaken when, after his resignation, he accepted a £3,000 per annum pension and a peerage for his wife and, still more, when he became Earl of Chatham on briefly returning as Prime Minister in 1766–8. His Premiership, an experiment in the Patriot ideal of a non-party Ministry based on support for ‘measures not men’, collapsed amidst Cabinet recriminations and power struggles when illness removed him as its unifying force. Chatham’s subsequent espousal of parliamentary reform regained him some popular and independent support (though it also separated him from other major politicians), but he lost touch with the national mood on foreign and imperial policy which had formerly been his greatest strength. He urged war on an unreceptive country over the Spanish occupation of the Falkland Islands in 1770, and he unavailingly pressed peace and reconciliation with America on an impatient country between 1774 and his death in 1778.

The relationship between the Younger Pitt and his father was a strong one. His cousin, William Grenville, later remarked that Pitt ‘always spoke of Lord Chatham with affection, and no wonder; for there never was a father more partial to a son’.¹ This relationship made it virtually inevitable that the Younger Pitt would go into politics at the earliest possible opportunity. Not only had Chatham trained his son for public speaking from childhood, but there was a pressing filial obligation to restore the Patriot, Great Commoner, reputation of his dead father. He should carry forward in the House of Commons the torch of Patriot principles which his father had espoused – though with the lessons before him (which he did not forget) of his father’s mistakes. Yet it was a bold venture, since he launched his political career from precarious financial foundations. Chatham died heavily in debt and Pitt was left dependent on a grant of £600 a year from his elder brother, and what he could borrow against his expectation when his father’s estate was eventually cleared of creditors. For an independent income of his own he had to turn to one of the professions open to gentlemen. In 1779–80 he served his terms at Lincoln’s Inn and in the summers of 1780 and 1781 he practised as a lawyer on the Western Circuit. This was however an uncertain financial existence, and, since Members of Parliament were not paid and his Patriot ideals precluded a pension or sinecure, he really needed an active, paid government office to sustain an effective political career.

In these early years of his career he was extraordinarily lucky in the way events unfolded in the most favourable way for him, though much still depended on his own capacity to exploit his good fortune. As the War of American Independence (1775–83) worsened, with France and Spain joining in against Britain, Chatham’s opposition to the breach with America was seen in a more favourable light. The floundering conduct of the war by Lord North’s government highlighted Chatham’s vigorous and successful conduct of the previous war, while the Ministry’s mismanagement was blamed on that corruption and excessive Crown influence which Chatham had so often attacked in the past. The materials were thus at hand for a vindication of his father’s name, and the opportunity for access to the appropriate forum came within months of his coming of age, when Parliament was dissolved and a general election called in September 1780.

In standing forward to vindicate his father’s name and principles, however, Pitt was also handicapped by those very principles. Idealistically he sought to be even purer than his father. He could not turn to any existing party or connection to help bring him forward but, like his father, advertised himself as an independent Whig’.² This meant being independent of party, but committed to maintaining the mixed and balanced constitution which contemporaries believed had been established by the Whigs in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and which he believed to be in jeopardy from encroachments on the independence of Parliament by the King, George III, and his government. The Younger Pitt carried his independence so far as to reject early offers of nomination to pocket boroughs, even though the proffering patrons were his relatives Earl Temple and Thomas Pitt, and even though his father had entered Parliament in this way. Instead he sought election by an open and independent constituency and turned to Cambridge University which he had entered, after a private domestic education, in 1773 at the age of fourteen. At Cambridge he took his MA without examination (as he was entitled to do as the son of a peer) in 1776, in which year his mother described him as ‘perfectly well at Cambridge, and follows the exercise of his mind, and that of his Horse, with an equal Ardor, which I confess I think for Him the perfect Thing’.³ During three years of farther study and hard riding there, his high spirits, playful wit and quick repartee among those of his acquaintance enabled him to build up a strong circle of friends and potential supporters. A seat for his University he described as ‘of all others the most desirable, as being free from expense, perfectly independent, and I think in every respect extremely honourable’.⁴ He began working up an interest on his behalf before he left Cambridge in 1779, but the general election, called unexpectedly early by the government, came before his canvassing had built up much momentum, and he came bottom of the poll.

Necessity therefore compelled him to accept the good offices of a Cambridge friend, the Duke of Rutland, whose contacts with the great northern borough-monger, Sir James Lowther, got Pitt returned for Appleby in Westmorland on terms which Pitt felt satisfied his need for independence. ‘Judging from my father’s principles,’ Pitt told his mother of Lowther, ‘he concludes that mine would be agreeable to his own.’ Lowther imposed no specific terms but expected Pitt to vacate the seat should their lines of conduct become opposite.⁵

The snap early election caught all opponents of government unprepared, and a temporary upturn in the war and Treasury influence enabled Lord North’s Ministry to secure a majority. Consequently the new member for Appleby, like his father, took his place on the side of the Opposition. He made his maiden speech barely a month after taking his seat, on 26 February 1781, in support of an Opposition bill to reallocate money from the King’s Civil List to the public service. His chance came unexpectedly, but he was ready for it thanks to his father’s coaching and his own attendance to hear his father’s later speeches and subsequent debates (his close friendship with William Wilberforce stemmed from the frequency with which they found themselves listening in the strangers’ gallery before each was elected to the Commons). Pitt spoke impromptu, with composure and assurance, to points made by former speakers in the debate. Even Lord North generously declared it the best first speech of a young man that he had ever heard. His father’s reputation gave him a ready hearing and inevitably there were comparisons with his father. Edmund Burke reportedly asserted that he was ‘not a chip of the old block: he is the old block himself. It may be that his father’s fame helped sway judgements in his favour. George Selwyn, who came to the House especially to hear his third speech on 12 June, judged that ‘if the matter and expression had come without that prejudice, or wrote down, all which could have been said was, that he was a sensible and promising young man’.⁶

Nevertheless his father’s renown could only advance his career so far. He needed his own abilities to take full advantage of this flying start, and after his first speech in the autumn session, even Selwyn admitted that ‘Mr Pitt’s speech today had made a great noise’. After his next speech the veteran Horace Walpole recorded that ‘young William Pitt took to pieces Lord North’s pretended declaration, which he had minuted down, and exposed them with the most amazing logical abilities, exceeding all the abilities he had already shown, and making men doubt whether he would not prove superior even to Charles Fox’. On New Year’s Day 1782 another of his audience wrote of him that ‘He is wonderful in all respects, but in nothing so much as in the regular and rapid improvement he makes: I have heard him speak three times only, and each speech was much better than the former.’⁷

Despite the verbal battery from a glittering display of Opposition talent, in which Pitt joined his voice to those of Charles Fox, Burke, Sheridan and others, Lord North had held his own in the spring session of 1781, sturdily seconded by the Scottish Lord Advocate, Henry Dundas. Pitt’s advance would have been halted without another twist of circumstances in his favour. The surrender of a British army at Yorktown catastrophically wrecked the war in America and destroyed confidence in the Ministry. In March 1782, with his majority collapsing, Lord North resigned.

The disintegration of North’s long-established government reduced the political world to a series of fragmented groupings. In these circumstances it was not just Pitt’s speaking powers that gave him weight. His ready wit and conviviality, particularly with acquaintances of his own age in Parliament, made him a leading figure in a young members’ club called Goostree’s. It largely consisted of old Cambridge friends: amongst whom were John Jeffreys Pratt and Lord Euston, the sons respectively of Earl Camden and the Duke of Grafton, former prominent supporters of his father. Edward Eliot and Henry Bankes he also knew from Cambridge. Wilberforce had also been at Cambridge but did not make Pitt’s acquaintance till they met in London, as did Richard Pepper Arden who shared a staircase with him at Lincoln’s Inn. The banker Robert Smith became connected with him after he entered Parliament. Two other Cambridge acquaintances, William Lowther and the Duke of Rutland (who controlled six Commons seats), might also be included in this close circle. Many of these were older than Pitt – Arden fifteen years, Smith seven, Rutland five, Bankes three, Euston and Eliot a year – and it says much for his attractive personality that he was able to win their affection and eventual support.

As yet Pitt had an influence with them rather than their guaranteed firm votes, but it was noticed: Selwyn wrote in March 1782 that ‘Young Pitt will not be subordinate; he is not so in his own society. He is at the head of a dozen young people, and it is a corps separate from that of Charley’s [Fox]; so there is another premier at the starting post, who, as yet, has never been shaved.’ Ten days earlier a scheme by Dundas to prop up North’s flagging Ministry included bringing in Pitt as Treasurer of the Navy ‘with a seat at the Treasury, Admiralty and Trade, to some of his young friends’. Already Pitt was seen as attracting his own support.⁸

Inexperience however led him into overplaying his hand. In expectation of offers when a new government was constructed, he determined never to accept a subordinate situation and he told the Commons so on 8 March. Horace Walpole considered it a great indiscretion:

so arrogant a declaration from a boy who had gained no experience from, nor ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Chronology
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 ‘Superior even to Charles Fox’: The short path to power
• Chapter 2 ‘Awkward I am certain in a certain quarter’: Pitt and the King
• Chapter 3 ‘Really master now’: Pitt as Prime Minister
• Chapter 4 ‘The ambition of my life’: Pitt and the business of government
• Chapter 5 ‘The theatre of future fame’: Pitt and the House of Commons
• Chapter 6 ‘The impression and effect of numbers on our side’: Pitt and the people
• Chapter 7 ‘To diminish the temptation to wars of ambition’: Pitt and the powers of Europe
• Chapter 8 ‘Enough to kill a man’: The erosion of power
• Further Reading
• Index