William Pitt the Younger

Eric J. Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134786763
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia moderna

William Pitt the Younger re-examines Pitt's career in the light of recent research and emphasizes that it should not be stereotyped as having a `reformist' phase in the years to 1793 and a `reactionary' phase thereafter.

His treatment includes explanation of:

* Pitt's rapid rise to power
* the importance of his relations with George III
* contemporary party politics, including his own description of himself as an `independent Whig'
* his administrative and financial reforms in the 1780s
* his foreign policy and war strategy
* his plans for assuring a satisfactory political union with Ireland and why they were frustrated.

This volume by Eric J. Evans, includes a complete historical background to the leader's political career and analyses his achievements. The author outlines Pitt's economic, domestic and foreign policy as well as detailing the changes in party politics and monarchy during the period.

1
The Making of a Prime Minister

Introduction: Pitt and the popular imagination

The Younger Pitt died almost two centuries ago. Inevitably, memories of a long-dead political leader—even one so eminent and important as Pitt—have faded from popular consciousness. Few, other than British historians, have much of an impression of him nowadays. Visitors to the National Portrait Gallery in London can absorb the flattering official portrait by John Hoppner. It shows a spare, controlled and upright figure in early middle age, possessed of fine features and a kindly gaze. This was not the image portrayed by contemporary cartoonists.Though they all represented a thinness unusual in prosperous politicians of the late eighteenth century, well used to lavish entertainment, large meals and fine wines, Pitt’s kindly gaze was usually replaced by grave determination in portrayals by government supporters. His many opponents in the 1790s, hostile both to the government’s persecution of reformers and to its taxation policies, represented him as cold, thin-lipped and almost manic in his rapacious intensity.

Every quiz buff will know that Pitt was the youngest Prime Minister in British history and will probably know that, unusually, he died in office. Some will be able to recall his last words (apparently well-enough authenticated): ‘Oh, my country! How I leave my country’—a reference to its plight at the time of his death. Britain was locked in a long and bloody conflict with France which was still far from resolution. Indeed, the last confirmed report Pitt received of the war, just before his death in January 1806, was of Napoleon’s crushing defeat of Britain’s Austrian allies at Austerlitz. A few might recall from old school lessons vague ideas about a Prime Minister allegedly ‘good in peacetime but a poor war leader’. Those who have seen the 1942 film The Young Mr Pitt, directed by Carol Reed and starring Robert Donat as Pitt and Robert Morley as Charles James Fox, will retain the powerfully manipulated image of a noble patriot who sacrificed both domestic comforts (Pitt never married) and personal priorities (the restorer of the nation’s finances is portrayed here as neglecting his own money needs) to provide selfless leadership to a nation in peril. It is as well to remember that this film was a piece of wartime propaganda. Audiences were expected to translate William Pitt’s virtues in standing alone against the French in the 1790s into Winston Churchill’s in doing much the same against the Germans in the 1940s. In truth, the implied comparison was far from exact. No one could deny either man’s patriotism but the cynic might be inclined to suggest that the only other attribute the two war leaders had in common was one certainly not suggested by the film: they both drank extremely heavily.

Retained images of Pitt, however, take us little further. Some will have in their minds the physical and emotional contrast with his great political opponent Fox: the former lean, disciplined and good at figures, the latter fat, emotional and much better with people. This, too, only lightly scratches the surface of a much more complex, and multi-faceted, reality. What is clear is that William Pitt the Younger is well worth the effort to understand. He was Prime Minister for longer than anyone else, except his eminent predecessor Sir Robert Walpole. His period of office spanned perhaps the two most profoundly significant changes to have occurred in modern history—the French Revolution, which challenged (and eventually transformed) the political order of Europe, and the Industrial Revolution which began in Britain at much the same time and whose consequences eventually affected the lives of virtually every individual on the planet. Pitt was a leader of great gifts who, at the height of his powers, exercised a dominance over both parliament and his monarch which very few Prime Ministers have equalled. Though very few politicians remember it now, and he would certainly have disclaimed the title, Pitt also has a reasonable claim to be considered the first leader of the modern Conservative Party. Throughout his long tenure as Prime Minister, he was also his own Chancellor of the Exchequer. The priority implied by his dual office-holding is highly significant. No other Prime Minister (with the possible exception of Gladstone) has ever demonstrated such profound understanding of the nation’s changing finances over a long period.

The well-cleared path to power

No major leader was so steeped in politics from his earliest years as the younger Pitt. He is, of course, ‘Pitt the Younger’ because of ‘Pitt the Elder’. This Pitt, also a William, was Prime Minister when his second son was born on 28 May 1759, the greatest year of his prime ministership, since a string of impressive military and naval victories vindicated his bold strategy during the so-called Seven Years’ War (1756–63). The Younger Pitt was the fourth of five children born between 1755 and 1761. His mother, Hester, whom the elder Pitt had married in 1754, was a Grenville, and thus a member of an even more established Whig political family. Her three brothers—Richard (from 1752 Earl Temple), George and James—all served in the Pitt-Newcastle government of 1757–61, though Temple and George Grenville later fell out with the elder Pitt. George was himself Prime Minister from 1763 to 1765. The Grenville-Pitt connection extended fruitfully into the next generation. George’s own son, William Wyndham Grenville, would be a senior minister of the younger Pitt in the 1780s and 1790s, rising to be both Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary; he was also one of Pitt’s most trusted confidants. William Grenville, indeed, was to succeed his cousin as Prime Minister, albeit briefly, in 1806.

William was educated at home (largely because of his father’s detestation of the brutality of Eton, his own school) before going to Cambridge University in 1773. Here he had a number of false starts, largely due to illness, and went into normal residence only in 1776, leaving the university in 1779. Of Pitt’s extraordinary intellectual gifts, there is no doubt. He absorbed the political implications of events almost as he absorbed infant milk. At the age of 7, when told of his father’s ennoblement as Earl of Chatham, he reflected on his subordinate position in a now aristocratic family. He informed his tutor that ‘he was glad he was not the eldest son, but that he could serve the country in the House of Commons like his papa’ (Ehrman, I, 6). By 1772, Lady Chatham was writing to her husband: ‘The fineness of William’s mind makes him enjoy with the highest pleasure what would be above the reach of any other creature of his small age’ (Stanhope, 1, 4).

Pitt seems to have inherited looks, hard-headedness and financial acumen alike from his mother’s side of the family. Regrettably for his family, he was to deploy these latter two attributes much more extensively on national than on personal affairs. His distinctive profile, the joy of so many cartoonists in the 1790s, bears a remarkable similarity to that of his mother in the portrait by Hudson. Lady Chatham spent most of the last years of her husband’s life sorting out the consequences of his grandiosity and wastefulness. The elder Pitt, who had been living extravagantly beyond his means more or less consistently since leaving office in 1761, left debts of £20,000 on his death in 1778. Though these were written off by the state, the Chatham income proved insufficient either to allow his widow to maintain an aristocratic lifestyle or to provide the young William with sufficient income to cover his living expenses in Cambridge. From the late 1770s Pitt began raising loans to sustain the family. The taste for personal borrowing never left him. He raised almost £7,000 to buy a fine house and farm in Kent in 1785–6—a sum which, as he acknowledged to his friend William Wilberforce, he could ill afford (Ehrman, I, 591). On his death in 1806, parliament responded much as it had done with his father. It voted a sum of £40,000 towards paying his personal debts. His tangled financial affairs were not finally sorted out for a further fifteen years (Ehrman, III, 834–5).

Early family talk that the bright second son would take up a legal career came to little. Pitt did reside in Lincoln’s Inn for a time in 1780 but it was always clear that his passion was politics. An appetite that was whetted in infancy by close proximity to his father and uncles became ravenous after he attended the highly charged parliamentary debates of 1778–80 when Lord North’s government was being lambasted by the opposition, particularly the Whig group led by the Marquess of Rockingham.

Pitt made an unsuccessful attempt on the parliamentary seat of Cambridge University in 1779 but his connections and abilities ensured that he did not have to wait long to enter parliament. A Cambridge friend, the Marquess of Granby,—who had recently succeeded to the Dukedom of Rutland—was politically linked to the great Cumbrian landowner and entrepreneur Sir James Lowther. Lowther—in the way of eighteenthcentury politics—had direct control of a number of parliamentary boroughs. He put one of them,Appleby in Westmorland, at the disposal of the younger Pitt, all expenses paid. The few electors of that pleasant market town were only very rarely put to the trouble of an election. No contest had been held there since 1754; none would be held until the Great Reform Act of 1832 which erased the borough from the electoral map. The younger Pitt was nominated in November 1780, was ‘elected’ the following month and took his seat in the Commons in January 1781. He was just short of 22 years old. Though such rapid progress would be highly unusual in the twentieth century, it was common enough in the eighteenth. ‘Rotten’ or ‘managed’ boroughs were a recognised route for able, well-connected politicians of tender age to reach parliament. It gave them plenty of time to absorb the atmosphere, learn their trade and then, in time, exercise political leadership.

What was unusual about Pitt, however, was the speed of his progress once inparliament. Within twenty months, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer; within thirty-five, Prime Minister. Such a precipitous upward trajectory requires explanation. It comes through a combination of two remarkable factors: Pitt’s own abilities and the destruction of political stability at the end of the disastrous war fought by Britain in a vain attempt to stop the colonies of America’s eastern seaboard from claiming their independence.

Pitt’s early parliamentary speeches made an immediate impact. His first, on 26 February 1781, was generously applauded both by the Prime Minister, Lord North, and by North’s most eloquent critic, Charles James Fox. Burke is said to have remarked that, as Chatham’s son, ‘He was not a chip of [sic] the old block; he is the old block itself’ (Ehrman, I, 52). What impressed, apart from the delivery and an already well-honed attentiveness to the mood of the House, was the precocious authority and mastery of subject matter. Calm, informed authority at a time of mounting political crisis was a prime asset. He spoke relatively rarely, making about twenty speeches between January 1781 and July 1782, but always with effect. Henry Dundas, a shrewd and experienced observer, praised his ‘first-rate abilities…and…most persuasive eloquence’ (Ehrman, I, 55).

Another necessary attribute was Pitt’s stance as a reformer in the early part of his career. Reform had moved steadily up the political agenda during the prime ministership of Lord North (1770–82) and its significance for Pitt’s career is explored in more detail in Chapter 2. Here it need only be stated that demands for parliamentary and administrative reform were a prime weapon in the mounting antigovernment campaign from 1778 onwards. By early 1781, when Pitt arrived in parliament, it was clear that Lord North’s administration, which had to that point been by far the most stable of George III’s reign, was in serious trouble. Its parliamentary majorities were dwindling steadily and on some high-profile issues during 1780 it had actually been defeated. Opposition groups eagerly exploited both reverses in America and the government’s apparent inability to handle demands from Protestants in Ireland for greater self-government.

North’s government was undermined by its failure to control discontent and rebellion in its two most important colonies. News of the decisive surrender of British troops at Yorktown in October 1781 caused North to remark ‘Oh God, it is all over’. In fact, it was not—quite. The King kept him uncomfortably and embarrassedly in office for a further six months while the authority of Britain’s government dwindled almost to nothing. North’s eventual resignation in March 1782 began one of the most turbulent two years in British parliamentary history. From it, the younger Pitt emerged, against all expectation, as the decisive victor.

Pitt inevitably ranged himself with the opposition to North, echoinghis father’s position in the 1770s that the Prime Minister’s American policy was misconceived and disastrous. He also spoke about the increasingly fractious relations between King and parliament. North’s ministry was replaced in March 1782 by a coalition of anti-North Whigs under the Marquess of Rockingham, leader of the largest and most effective group of Whig reformers. It contained, as Home and Foreign Secretaries respectively, the Earl of Shelburne and Charles James Fox. Though it seems strange to modern eyes, Pitt (at 22 years of age and with fourteen months’ parliamentary experience) was seriously considered for a ministerial post. His status as Chatham’s son carried substantial weight and he was close to Shelburne, who had himself come to prominence as one of the ablest of Chatham’s supporters. Furthermore, the initial impression he had made was, as we have seen, extremely favourable. Pitt certainly had the supreme self-confidence to announce to the Commons in March 1782: ‘For myself, I could not expect to form part of a new administration; but were my doing so more within my reach, I feel myself bound to declare that I would never accept a subordinate situation’ (Stanhope, I, 70).

Perhaps he already foresaw that the new ministry, which George III thoroughly disliked, and which was internally divided particularly by the rivalry and mutual dislike of Shelburne and Fox, was unlikely to last long and that his own reputation would not be enhanced by association with it. In fact, it was brought to a premature close by Rockingham’s sudden death at the beginning of July. Shelburne had already been angling with the King for a realignment of ministers which would see Fox downgraded, if not replaced. The King speedily announced that Shelburne would be his new Prime Minister, whereupon Fox (and most of the old Rockinghams) resigned. The Shelburne ministry was, therefore, significantly different in composition from the Rockingham one and Shelburne had need of new talent to replace the experienced, if antagonistic, ministers who went out with, or soon after, Fox. Pitt was an obvious choice and could hardly describe the Chancellorship of the Exchequer (though the office had less prestige then than now) as a ‘subordinate situation’.

Pitt served throughout Shelburne’s ministry, which lasted from July 1782 to February 1783. Its work was dominated by proposals for peace with the victorious American colonies and Pitt was duly supportive of the efforts made. It was also concerned with administrative reform and here Pitt took a more prominent line, carrying forward Shelburne’s plans for customs reform and for tighter controls on public offices. The bills passed the Commons before being rejected in the Lords and they are important as an early indication of two of Pitt’s great passions: saving government money by efficient deployment of resources, and attempting to ensure thatremuneration of offices should be on the basis of public service and not political advantage.

Shelburne’s ministry was brought down by parliamentary arithmetic. Fox, now clearly in charge of the Rockingham group of reformist Whigs (although he formally deferred to the Duke of Portland), had been scheming to bring his rival down. He calculated that, with the support of North’s followers, he could deprive Shelburne of a parliamentary majority and force his resignation. He was right. By early 1783, with the American issue virtually settled, Fox and North had far less to disagree about than previously. North’s political ambition continued to burn bright and his easy charm made him a useful leader of a substantial parliamentary group. The two men reached an agreement early in February and tested it out in two motions criticising Shelburne’s government in the middle of the month. On 24 February, Shelburne resigned.

This outcome outraged the King on at least three grounds. First, he was by no means convinced that Shelburne had to go; in his view, the Prime Minister could have fought on to test the durability of this new grouping. Second, he hated Fox and most of his supporters with a passion. Third, he had reposed absolute faith in North as his Prime Minister for almost twelve years. A combination of interests between Foxites and Northites he thought of as virtual treason. It was, to him, proof of the view he had held when he came to the throne in 1760: that established politicians were motivated by greed and personal ambition, rather than by any desire to provide good government. For five weeks, while Britain tottered on virtually without any government, he tried to hold back the logic of a Fox-North administration—that ‘infamous coalition’ as he was to call it. Significantly, he turned first to Pitt to rescue him from his difficulty. Pitt at first agreed to become Prime Minister before having second thoughts, based on the calculation that North would probably continue to oppose and that his own position, therefore, could be made no stronger than Shelburne’s had latterly been.

Pitt’s decision probably reflected a deeper calculation, too. He knew well enough how outraged the King was by the prospect of a government led by Fox and North. If the King found no other first minister in the meantime, he would accept it with an exceedingly ill grace and would work to ensure that it had as difficult, and as short, a lease on power as possible. Pitt would prefer to come into office after a discredited government had failed, rather than before a numerically powerful coalition had been tried. Perhaps this is to invest Pitt with too much prescience. However, contemporaries were impressed with him. The Duke of Grafton recorded in his diary:

The good judgment of so young a man, who, not void of ambition on this trying occasion, could refuse this splendid offer, adds much to the lustre of the character he had acquired, for it was a temptation sufficient to have offset the resolution of most men.

(Stanhope, I, 109–10)

The details of the Fox-North coalition (nominally headed by the Duke of Portland) need not concern us. It concluded peace with the American colonies and it did command majorities in the House of Commons. However, it never had the remotest chance of winning over the King, who, as Pitt had assumed, schemed against it from the beginning. In December 1783 he exerted massive influence on the House of Lords to persuade it to reject the coalition’s important bill for the government of India. This defeat he then chose to interpret (on scant warrant) as a public loss of confidence in the Fox-North administration, which he proceeded summarily to dismiss. There is evidence that Pitt gave unofficial advice to the King on how the dismissal of his hated ministry might be effected. As in February, his first choice of replacement was Pitt, and this time Pitt did not turn him down.

Why was Pitt the King’s choice to resolve the most substantial political crisis of his reign? We can take it as read both that the King appreciated Pitt’s gifts and that he recognised also that in his brief parliamentary career he had created a universally strong impression. By December 1783, he was disposed to believe that if any minister could extricate him from the constitutional difficulties in which he found himself, that minister was William Pitt. But there was much more to it than this. Both the family name, and its political reputation, mattered. George had not always seen eye to eye with the Earl of Chatham, especially when the latter was in office, but Chatham did not come from that hated group of Whig politicians which had been collectively known as the ‘Old Corps’. These politicians George III accused of using unconstitutional stratagems to reduce the powers of monarchy almost to nothing. He considered the Rockingham group to be their malign successors, intent now on depriving the monarch of the most precious power of all: his right to choose his own ministers. Pitt was never a royal toady; indeed, he shared some of the Rockingham concerns about royal influence, though to a milder degree. He did, however, both recognise and respect the constitutional position of the sovereign and he was not inclined either to bluster or to dictate to George. He respected the convention that he was genuinely taking office as ‘the King’s minister’, with all that the phrase implied for royal choice. The irony was that, as we shall see (Chapter 5),Pitt’s own reforms would do more long-term damage to the independent powers of the monarchy than any of the direct constitutional confrontations of the early 1780s. On 19 December 1783, he took office as Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• In the Same Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Time Chart
• 1: The Making of a Prime Minister
• 2: Pitt the Political Reformer
• 3: Pitt and the ‘National Revival’, 1783–93
• 4: Foreign and Commercial Policy, 1783–91
• 5: Pitt, Party and Monarchy
• 6: A Nation at War, 1793–1801
• 7: Pitt, Patriotism and Reform in the 1790s
• 8: The Importance of Ireland
• 9: The Closing Years, 1801–6
• 10: Conclusion and Assessment
• Further Reading