William Pitt the Younger: A Biography

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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.’

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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!’

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.

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.

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.’

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.

The main room of the set is now a function room, with portraits of Pitt and Gray on the walls.

In his wonderful book recounting his travels in England, Moritz also remarks on the ‘incomparable’ English habit of ‘roasting slices of buttered bread before the fire … this is called “toast”’.

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‘Appelby is the Place I am to Represent.’

WILLIAM PITT

‘A dead minister, the most respectable that ever existed, weighs very light in the scale against any living one.’

EARL TEMPLE

‘CHATHAM’, STANHOPE REMARKED in his 1860s biography of Pitt, ‘had been a little unthrifty.’

This was putting it mildly. On the death of Chatham in 1778, Parliament voted £20,000 – the equivalent of something approaching £2 million today

– to rescue his family and his memory from financial embarrassment. They also voted an annuity of £4,000 in perpetuity to the Earldom of Chatham, now inherited by William’s elder brother John. Theoretically, William Pitt was left £3,500 by his father. In practice, there was no money to honour this legacy, since the whole of the generous grant by Parliament would be taken up by his father’s debts. William had also been left a share of the mortgaged properties at Burton Pynsent and Hayes, but none of this came his way until Hayes was sold, by which time he was already Prime Minister. His total income as he prepared to move from Cambridge into the wider world was £600 a year, in the form of a grant from his elder brother. This was to prove insufficient for the needs of a young gentleman laying the foundations of his career and travelling about in the south-east of England a good deal. When he needed more he submitted a request to his mother. ‘My finances’, he tells her in November 1778, ‘are in no urgent Want of Repair; but if I should happen to buy a Horse they will be soon, and therefore, if it is not inconvenient to you, I shall be much obliged to you for a draught of 50£.’

Or in December 1779: ‘The approach of Christmas, and the expense of moving, oblige me to beg you to supply me with a draft of 60£.’

He was particularly assiduous in assuring his mother that he would not drink too much or work too hard, as in this letter from Cambridge in January 1780:

The Charge of looking slender and thin when the doctor saw me, I do not entirely deny; but if it was in a greater degree than usual, it may fairly be attributed to the hurry of London, and an accidental cold at the Time … The use of the horse I assure you I do not neglect, in the properest medium; and a sufficient number of idle avocations secure me quite enough from the danger of too much study … Among the Principal Occupations of Cambridge at this Season of Christmas are perpetual College Feasts, a species of Exercise in which, above all others, I shall not forget your rule of moderation.

His mother helped him financially whenever she could, but since the annuity settled upon Chatham by the King in 1761 and now due to her was frequently in arrears she was not always able to do so. Soon Pitt had borrowed £1,000 at 5 per cent from the friendly banker Mr Thomas Coutts, in return for his signing over the paternal legacy which would never be paid. In order to pursue a career at the Bar, however, he needed a residence at Lincoln’s Inn, which required still more substantial resources. He wrote hopefully to his mother:

It will very soon be necessary for me to have rooms at Lincoln’s Inn … The whole expense of these will be Eleven Hundred Pounds, which sounds to me a frightful sum … The rooms are in an exceeding good situation in the new Buildings, and will be perfectly fit for Habitation in about two months. Soon after that time it will be right for me to begin attending Westminster Hall during the term, and then chambers will be more convenient than any other residence … I have done no more than to secure that they may not be engaged to any other person till I have returned an Answer, and I shall be glad to know your opinion as soon as possible. You will be so good as to consider how far you approve of the idea, if it be practicable, and whether there are any means of advancing the money out of my fortune before I am of Age.

Desperate to help him, his mother was no doubt behind the surprise suggestion by his uncle Earl Temple that he would advance Pitt the necessary sum. Having paid the first instalment, Earl Temple disobligingly died, and Pitt secured the chambers on the promise of his late uncle’s obligation, while mortgaging them the following year to obtain more cash. Already, at the age of twenty-one, he had dipped a toe into the vicious whirlpool that his personal finances would become.

From his late teens Pitt enjoyed the busy life of a young man who could move about freely, flitting between the family homes, attendance at Lincoln’s Inn and the Galleries of the Lords and Commons in London, and the reassuring intellectual security of Pembroke College. He was often in London with his brothers and sisters, frequently staying in Harley Street at the house of his older sister Hester, who in 1775 had married Lord Mahon, son of Earl Stanhope, and by early 1780 had three children. Pitt seems to have attended the opera occasionally, having developed a taste for music at Cambridge even though Pretyman subsequently insisted that he had ‘no ear’,

and reported attending masquerades and evenings at the Pantheon,

but he was not keen on the wilder social events:

Nerot’s Hotel, Wednesday Night [1779]

James is gone with my sisters to the ball as a professed dancer, which stands in the place of an invitation; a character which I do not assume, and have therefore stayed away.

He continued to prefer more intellectual evenings. It was at a dinner in Lincoln’s Inn during the Gordon Riots that the celebrated encounter took place between the twenty-one-year-old Pitt and the already famous historian Edward Gibbon, who was publishing the second and third volumes of his momentous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Another young lawyer, James Bland Burges, described how Gibbon had just concluded a series of ‘brilliant and pleasant’ anecdotes ‘with his customary tap on the lid of his snuff box’, when ‘a deep toned but clear voice was heard from the bottom of the table, very calmly and firmly impugning the correctness of the narrative, and the propriety of the doctrine of which it had been made the vehicle’. Gibbon saw

a tall, thin, and rather ungainly looking young man, who now sat quietly and silently eating some fruit. There was nothing very prepossessing or very formidable in his exterior, but, as the few words he had uttered appeared to have made a considerable impression on the company, Mr. Gibbon, I suppose, thought himself bound to maintain his honour by suppressing such an attempt to dispute his supremacy. He accordingly undertook the defence of the propositions in question, and a very animated debate took place between him and his youthful antagonist, Mr. Pitt, and for some time was conducted with great talent and brilliancy on both sides. At length the genius of the young man prevailed over that of his senior, who, finding himself driven into a corner from which there was no escape, made some excuse arising from the table and walked out of the room.

Gibbon stalked out ‘in high dudgeon’, and ‘when we returned into the dining-room we found Mr. Pitt proceeding very tranquilly with the illustration of the subject from which his opponent had fled, and which he discussed with such ability, strength of argument, and eloquence, that his hearers were filled with profound admiration’.

It had been clear for some years that a career as a lawyer would be a fallback for Pitt, and the proximity to the House of Commons of the law courts, literally yards away in and around Westminster Hall, provided an additional incentive for him. As it turned out, his legal career was not long, but during it he again showed his usual mixture of easy ability and high popularity in private company. Another lawyer of the time recalled: ‘Among lively men of his own time of life, Mr. Pitt was always the most lively and convivial in the many hours of leisure which occur to young unoccupied men on a Circuit, and joined all the little excursions to Southampton, Weymouth, and such parties of amusement as were habitually formed. He was extremely popular. His name and reputation of high acquirements at the university commanded the attention of his seniors. His wit, his good humour, and joyous manners endeared him to the younger part of the Bar.’

He was called to the Bar in the summer of 1780, but it is clear throughout all his correspondence that his overriding fascination remained with politics. In the summer of 1779 it was thought by some that Parliament might be dissolved two years ahead of its maximum seven-year term. The war was going badly, Lord North and his colleagues appeared dejected and the King was even forced to preside at a Cabinet meeting to try to deter North’s enemies from attacking his First Minister. Pitt turned his thoughts to how and where he could enter Parliament.

Pitt wanted to be in Parliament from the earliest possible date, but it did not accord with his concept of himself simply to represent any constituency which was available. He had a very clear idea of where he wished to represent, and from the summer of 1779 expressed an explicit interest in being one of the two Members for Cambridge University.

This was not simply because he spent a good deal of time there and was familiar with the place, since there was little need in this period for most Members of Parliament to know or to spend time in their constituencies. Rather it was because from the outset he wanted to be a particular type of politician, and that would require a particular type of constituency.

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, accustomed as we are to universal suffrage and the periodic redrawing of constituency boundaries to keep up with the changing distribution of population, the electoral basis of the House of Commons in the eighteenth century seems extraordinary and chaotic. It was not democratic in any modern sense of the term, and was not intended to be; but it was intended to ensure that the interests of every part of the country were represented, and that an element of competition took place among the aristocracy and country gentry as to who would have access to power and the spoils of office.

The House of Commons in 1780 had 558 Members, around a hundred fewer than today, with 489 from England, forty-five from Scotland and twenty-four from Wales. Ireland had a separate Parliament which was to be given increased powers in 1782, so there were no Irish seats in the House of Commons at this stage. Only the English constituencies were of interest to Pitt as he sought his first election to Parliament. Of these the generally most prestigious were the forty counties, each of which elected two Members. For two reasons, however, these were of little appeal to a politician who aspired to high office. First, they had a relatively wide franchise, embracing all males who owned the freehold of land with a rental value of more than forty shillings a year, and could have electorates running into many thousands. A contested election in Yorkshire, for instance, could easily produce 20,000 voters at the poll. As a result they were extremely expensive to contest (William Wilberforce’s two opponents in Yorkshire in 1807 reportedly spent over £100,000 each – the equivalent of more than £5 million), and the funds had to be found by the candidate, or a rich patron, or his supporters. Often huge sums were spent on a ‘canvass’ of county seats to see whether it was worth putting a particular candidate forward before embarking on the immense expense and trouble of actually contesting the election. In the 1780 election, only two counties would actually go to the lengths of having a contest.

As an additional obstacle it had been agreed in 1707, as part of an earlier attempt to rein in the patronage of the Crown, that an MP accepting an office of profit from the Crown such as a ministerial position would resign his seat and fight a by-election. This practice continued into the early twentieth century, sometimes leading to the defeat of freshly appointed Ministers such as Winston Churchill in 1908. In the eighteenth century the expense of fighting a county seat over and over again would have prohibited a ministerial career. On the whole, the counties were represented by ‘independent country gentlemen’ from long-established local families, but occasionally a contested county could give great authority to a popular campaign, such as the repeated re-election of John Wilkes for Middlesex in the 1760s.

By far the most numerous constituencies were the 203 cities and boroughs which elected 405 Members between them. These were heavily weighted to the south-west of the country and to seaports, and were still based on the wealth and prominence of towns in mediaeval times. The entitlement to vote in these constituencies varied hugely, sometimes being relatively wide as in the counties (the City of Westminster itself being an example), sometimes limited to the few dozen members of the corporation of the town, and sometimes limited to the owners of certain properties or ‘burgages’. It was thus variously possible to control a borough by instructing the voters, by bribing the corporation, or simply by owning sufficient burgages. Landowners would commonly instruct their tenants how to vote, and since the voting itself was openly recorded this rarely left the voters with much of a choice. In other circumstances voters could sell themselves to the highest bidder. As Thomas Pitt wrote in 1740: ‘There are few [Cornish] boroughs where the common sort of people do not think they have as much right to sell themselves and their votes, as they have to sell their corn and their cattle.’

The provision of meals and alcohol was a standard part of such bribery; alcohol could be useful in other ways too, as George Selwyn, MP for Gloucester, complained in 1761. ‘Two of my voters were murdered yesterday by an experiment which we call shopping, that is, locking them up and keeping them dead drunk to the day of election. Mr. Snell’s agents forced two single Selwyns into a post chaise, where, being suffocated with the brandy that was given them and a very fat man that had the custody of them, they were taken out stone dead.’

Over half of the boroughs could be purchased in one way or another, an average price in the late eighteenth century being around £3,000 to £4,000. They would be bought by the major political families, who might control half a dozen such seats; or by ‘Nabobs’ returning with money from India and seeking to use their wealth to purchase influence; or, amazingly by the standards of later centuries, by the Treasury itself, which would often use several tens of thousands of pounds of the King’s money, and some of the taxpayer’s, to procure the election of government candidates in a general election.

Pitt set his face against contesting most of these constituencies. He could not afford the expense of fighting one of the truly open boroughs, nor was he well enough known in any of them to have a chance of success. He did not want to be instructed how to vote in Parliament by a patron who had purchased his election, and he was not a supporter of the government. He received tentative offers from his cousins of the old family borough of Old Sarum, which Thomas Pitt had pawned to the Treasury in 1761 as he fled bankruptcy, and of Buckingham, which was in the pocket of Earl Temple. Not only were these offers vague, but he told his mother he was worried that taking them up could not ‘be done on a liberal, Independent Footing’.

For Pitt was even now pursuing the ideal of being different from other politicians. He already combined a radiant intellectual self-confidence with his deep sense of being Chatham’s son, and Chatham had cultivated at the high points of his career the notion of detachment and independence from party and patronage (although he had been happy to represent the pocket boroughs of the Duke of Newcastle for many years). Pitt, who was carried along by the demands for economical and parliamentary reform as the answer to the corruption and waste so evident under Lord North, aspired to succeed in politics through ‘character’ rather than through ‘influence’. Steeped in the classical texts which praised the ‘virtue’ of outstanding figures, he could be forgiven for envisaging his own heroic role as an answer to the corruption of the times and a reinforcement of the traditions of his father. He already knew enough not to be naïve about political methods, and would be happy to let ‘influence’ be used on his behalf, but throughout his entire career he would seek to maintain the independence and incorruptibility of his own character, and at all costs the appearance of it.

Thus it was idealism as well as familiarity which led him to seek election for Cambridge University. ‘It is a seat of all others’, he wrote to his mother in July 1779, ‘the most desirable, as being free from expense, perfectly independent, and I think in every respect extremely honourable … You will perhaps think the idea hastily taken up, when I tell you that six Candidates have declared already; but I assure you that I shall not flatter myself with any vain hopes.’

It is not clear who had encouraged Pitt to have such hopes, for vain they appeared to be for a twenty-year-old up against the long-established candidates of the main political groupings. Writing for support to opposition figures, he received a rather dusty reply from the Marquis of Rockingham: ‘I am so circumstanced from the knowledge I have of several persons who may be candidates, and who indeed are expected to be so, that it makes it impossible for me in this instance to show the attention to your wishes which your own as well as the great merits of your family entitle you to.’

He also received a rather patronising putdown from the normally helpful Earl Temple: ‘As to your prospect of success, I cannot form any opinion … How far it may be advisable for you before you have more ripened in your profession to launch out into the great ocean of politicks … is a matter of great doubt … The memory of your father & the great character you have attained speak forcibly in your favour; but a dead minister, the most respectable that ever existed, weighs very light in the scale against any living one.’

Pitt the young idealist was not put off by this lofty discouragement, and commenced his canvassing.

He busied himself writing to acquaintances around the university, ‘I rely on the support of my own College and my musical friends, both which characters, I hope prejudice you in my favour.’

But in the event there was to be no election in 1779. In early 1780 Pitt was still sitting in the Gallery of the Commons watching the debates of the same Parliament, the North administration still battling on. His letters exulted in seeing the government defeated several times: ‘What the consequence will be, cannot be guessed, but I have no ideas of Ministry being able to stand.’

He watched excitedly as Edmund Burke – ‘I had no Idea till now of his Excellence’

– brought in his sweeping proposals for economical reform, seeking to abolish the special royal jurisdictions in Wales, Cheshire, Lancaster and Cornwall, to reduce the Civil List through which money was provided to the King, and to abolish the offices of Master of the Household, Treasurer, Comptroller, Cofferer, the Board of the Green-Cloth, the Wardrobe Office, the Jewel Office, the Keepers of Stag Hounds, Buck Hounds, Fox Hounds, and many other Crown offices. A Bill was introduced to exclude government contractors from being Members of Parliament, along with the presentation of damning evidence of their greed and inefficiency. At last major reform seemed in the offing.

Yet Pitt also watched as one by one Burke’s proposals were watered down and then abandoned, and as the much-vaunted Contractors Bill was crushed in the House of Lords. He watched Lord North take on the chin the famous motion condemning the influence of the Crown, and then render it meaningless by defeating a motion asking the King not to dissolve Parliament until the influence of the Crown at elections had been diminished. Pitt learnt the lesson, one he would not forget as he led a government facing a hostile House of Commons only four years later, that even a government assailed on all sides can tough it out for a time if it sticks together and has the solid support of the King. And he soon learnt a second lesson: a government working with the King could spring a nasty surprise.

Parliament rose in mid-August after a long and exhausting session. No sooner had opposition politicians relaxed into their summer watering holes than, on 1 September, George III agreed to North’s request that Parliament be dissolved and an immediate general election announced. With the opposition surprised and disorganised, opinion backing the government against the recent Gordon Riots, and the Treasury’s money doing its work in marginal cases, the North administration was confident of broadly maintaining its majority. By now Pitt had secured the support of the Earl of Shelburne, who led a small band of parliamentarians still loyal to the memory of Chatham. He wrote an effusive letter of thanks, saying he was ‘truly sensible of this fresh instance of that friendly assistance which our family has eminently experienced from your Lordship’.

When the election was called, Pitt rushed to Cambridge, but his contest was hopeless. On 16 September it was announced that he had come bottom of the poll of five candidates, the two seats for Cambridge University being won by a sitting Member who supported the government and a previous runner-up who was a strong follower of Rockingham. Pitt had been squeezed out. He wrote philosophically to his mother:

Pemb. Hall, Sept. 16 [1780),

My dear Mother,

Mansfield and Townshend have run away with the Prize, but my struggle has not been dishonourable.

I am just going to Cheveley [the seat of the Duke of Rutland] for a day or two, and shall soon return to you for as long as the law will permit, which will now be probably the sole object with me. I hope you are all well.

Your ever dutiful and affectionate

W. Pitt

It was not an easy autumn for the family. Pitt’s sister Hester had never fully recovered from the birth of her third child in February. She died in July. Over the next few years Pitt and his bereaved brother-in-law Lord Mahon would become close friends, but this was a sad time made even worse by the news the following year that the youngest brother, James, had died on naval service in the West Indies at the end of 1780. Pitt wrote to Pretyman: ‘I have to regret the loss of a brother who had every thing that was most amiable and promising, every thing that I could love and admire; and I feel the favourite hope of my mind extinguished by this untimely blow. Let me however, assure you, that I am too much tried in affliction not to be able to support myself under it; and that my poor mother and sister, to whom I brought the sad account yesterday, have not suffered in their health, from so severe a shock.’

With the death of Earl Temple the previous year, Pitt’s mother had now lost in rapid succession her husband, elder brother, eldest daughter and youngest son. After Hester’s death William spent time at Hayes or Burton Pynsent with his mother, and at other times kept up his flow of excited and informative letters. By November 1780 he could report at last that he would be a Member of Parliament. His Cambridge friend Lord Granby had now succeeded his grandfather as Duke of Rutland. Wanting to see Pitt in Parliament as soon as possible, he approached his friend Sir James Lowther, who controlled a number of boroughs in the north of England. As Lowther’s cousin William had been returned in the election for both Appleby and Carlisle and chose to sit for the latter, Lowther needed a new Member for Appleby. Such rearrangements in the few months after a general election were entirely customary in the eighteenth century. Lowther had a reputation as a rather dominating patron, but he was prepared to lift any normal conditions for the son of Chatham. Pitt wrote to his mother:

Lincoln’s Inn, Thursday night [November 1780]

My dear Mother,

I can now inform you that I have seen Sir J. Lowther, who has repeated to me the offer He had before made, and in the handsomest manner. Judging from my Father’s Principles, He concludes that mine would be agreeable to his own, and on that Ground, to me of all others the most agreeable desires to bring me in. No Kind of Condition was mentioned, but that if ever our Lines of Conduct should become opposite, I should give Him an opportunity of choosing another Person. On such Liberal Terms I could certainly not hesitate to accept the proposal, than which Nothing could be in any respect more agreeable. Appleby is the Place I am to represent, and the Election will be made (probably in a week or Ten days) without my having any trouble, or even visiting my constituents.

The offer from Lowther was liberal enough to provide Pitt with freedom of action unless he completely reversed his political stance. William Pitt, aged twenty-one, was now a Member of Parliament.

Assessments of inflation over such long periods are at best approximate. In this book any illustrations of the present-day value of money in Pitt’s time are based on the index agreed in 2003 by the House of Commons Library, the Bank of England and the Office of National Statistics.

The Pantheon, on Oxford Street to the east of Oxford Circus, was a prominent venue for concerts and dances and was described by Horace Walpole as ‘the most beautiful edifice in England’. Today the site is occupied by a store of Marks & Spencer.

Cambridge and Oxford Universities had two Members each. The University Members were finally abolished in 1948.

The franchise in the universities was based on membership of the University Senate, and was thus possessed only by academics. These constituencies were also unusual in having a secret ballot. The electorate of Cambridge University was a little over seven hundred strong in the early 1780s.