Chatham

Chapter I Introductory

Posterity, this is an impartial picture. I am neither dazzled by the blaze of the times in which I have lived, nor f if there are spots in the sun, do I deny that I see them. It is a man I am describing, and one, whose greatness will bear to have his blemishes fairly delivered to you — not from a love of censure in me, but of truth ; and because it is history I am writing, not romance.

Such was the judgment passed on Chatham by a hostile contemporary, whose Memoirs were withheld from the public eye for nearly a century after their compilation. In these words Horace Walpole sums up his incisive character of " the terrible cornet of horse " whom Sir Eobert Walpole attempted to muzzle, of the aspiring orator who contributed so much to the fall of Sir Eobert, of the imperious statesman who finally succeeded to more than the power of Walpole at his zenith, reversed his policy, and entirely recast the international position of Great Britain in the world.

In eight centuries our country has known but four great creative statesmen : men who, to use the words of a well-known historian, have been " founders or creators of a new order of things." William the

B 1

Conqueror made all England an organic nation. Edward the First conceived and founded Great Britain. Cromwell made the United Kingdom and founded our Sea Power. Chatham made the Colonial System and was the founder of the Empire. For good and for evil, through heroism and through spoliation, with all its vast and far-reaching consequences, industrial, economic, social, and moral — the foundation of the Empire was the work of Chatham. He changed the course of England's history — nay, the course of modern history. For a century and a half the development of our country has grown upon the imperial lines of Chatham's ideals ; and succeeding statesmen have based the keynote of their policy on enlarging the range of these ideals, in warding off the dangers they involved, in curbing or in stimulating the excesses they bred.

Frederick of Prussia said of Chatham, "England has long been in labour, and has suffered much to produce Mr. Pitt: but at last she has brought forth a man." By France, the rise and fall of Chatham was watched as equivalent to the loss or the gain of a decisive campaign. His hyperbolic self-will, his almost grotesque arrogance, seemed excused by the deference of all with whom he acted, and the timidity of all whom he confronted. Contemporary memoirs ring with anecdotes of his personal ascendency and the terror he inspired at home and abroad. When Chatham said to a colleague, "I know that I can save this country, and that no one else can," it was not regarded as arrogance and presumption, but was treated as simple truth, which no doubt it was. Walpole's famous character of Chatham, from which a i.] INTRODUCTORY 3

sentence heads this chapter, runs thus : " The admirers of Mr. Pitt extol the reverberation he gives to our councils, the despondence he banished, the spirit he infused, the conquests he made, the security he affixed to our trade and plantations, the humiliations of France, the glory of Britain carried under his ministrations to a pitch at which it never had arrived — and all this is exactly true."

In his own age and in ours, Chatham has cast a spell over men's minds, and has usually been spoken of in superlatives of praise and of blame. In Westminster Abbey we read, that it was during his administration that Great Britain was exalted " to a height of prosperity and glory unknown to any former age." In the Guildhall we read that William Pitt was raised up by Providence "as the principal instrument in His memorable work." Both these public monuments were erected many years after the statesman's fall and retirement. The first was ordered by Parliament under the ministry of Lord North, whom Chatham so fiercely opposed and denounced. The second inscription was composed by Edmund Burke, his opponent and severe judge. The French Abbe Eaynal, in his History of Indian Commerce (of 1780), declared that Chatham " raised the heart of England so high, that his administration was nothing but a chain of conquests." Lord Brougham, in his Historical Sketches, tells us that Chatham " is the person to whom every one would point if desired to name the most successful statesman and the most brilliant orator that this country ever produced." Lord Macaulay, in many things his severest critic, in his fine description of the niouument in the Abbey, concludes that " history, while for the warning of vehement, high, and daring natures, she notes his many errors, will yet deliberately pronounce, that, among the eminent men whose bones lie near his, scarcely one has left a more stainless, and none a more splendid name." In our own time Mr. J. E. Green is fascinated by "the personal and solitary grandeur" of Chatham, "by the depth of his conviction, his passionate love of all he deemed lofty and true, his fiery energy, his poetic imaginativeness," "his purely public spirit." "He loved England with an intense and personal love. He believed in her power, her glory, her public virtue, till England learned to believe in herself." Mr. Lecky has said: " With all his faults he was a very great man — far surpassing both in mental and moral altitude the other politicians of his generation." As Lord Shelburne, the colleague and successor of Chatham, records that he was a man " of a most extraordinary imagination," so the descendant and historian of Shelburne speaks of the great orator "as the eternal monument of the highest eloquence employed on the noblest objects."

The reverberation of these achievements has passed away. The long and crowded epoch of Chatham's son tended to make men forgetful of the father, who far outlived the span of his own power ; and the tremendous events that followed the French Eevolution and the Empire of Napoleon overshadowed the reign of George n. But history will continue to dwell with praise or with blame, with sympathy or with sorrow, on the lonely chief who breathed a new soul into his countrymen, who planted the saplings which have i.] INTRODUCTORY 5

grown into a mighty forest, who inspired that passion for transoceanic expansion which has led to such energies, such miseries, such glory, and such heartburning.

There seem to be peculiar difficulties in attempting to write the life of a statesman whose work so many of our statesmen have sought to imitate, whose methods and doctrines so many others have condemned. Chatham is usually regarded as pre-eminently a "war minister." And undoubtedly he " organised victory " on a scale greater than that achieved by any other English statesman. Though he never saw a battle-field in his life, he is reported to have said that " he loved honourable war." If he loved war for itself, as Alexander and Napoleon did, it is an indelible blot upon his name. The great-grandson of Chatham's colleague and successor, speaking before Chatham's monument in the Guildhall of London, has in our generation denounced "the scourge and calamity of a needless war." But it must not be forgotten that Chatham's wars were singularly sparing of blood, suffering, and ruin, to the victors as to the conquered. They have resulted in permanent conquests and settlements unexampled in modern history. The memory of these results has too often obscured the magnificent and far-seeing efforts of Chatham towards international justice, domestic reform, and peaceful progress. In many of the aims of good government he anticipated the work of his successors. In ages to come, this perhaps will be his true glory. Mr. Lecky has said: "No minister had a greater power of making a sluggish people brave, or a slavish people

6 CHATHAM [chap. i.

free or a disaffected people loyal." Of how many of our statesmen could this noble eulogy be passed? But, as Walpole reminds us, such a man must be painted as he was, with all his faults and all his failures. The glamour of his personality is nothing to us now. We have " to write history, not romance."

CHAPTEE II

EARLY LIFE

William Pitt was born on the 15th of November 1708, of an honourable and wealthy family, settled in the West of England. Until he entered Parliament at the age of twenty-six, nothing but a few bare facts have been recorded of his life ; nor have eulogists or critics given us a very definite picture of his boyhood and youth. It seems as if the majestic personality, which so deeply overawed his contemporaries, had caused his biographers to abstain from searching into the story of their hero's life, until he had become a striking character in the political world. " Of his infancy and early youth I have not been able to collect any authenticated information," sighs the most obsequious of his biographers. For biographical purposes, " The Great Commoner" had no youth. The bare facts extant are soon told.

William was the younger son of Eobert Pitt, M.P. for Old Sarum, who was the eldest son of Thomas Pitt, of Swallowfield, Berks, and of Boconnoc in Cornwall, who was also M.P. for Old Sarum, his own borough. In the genealogy prefixed to the authorised Life, the Pitt family is traced back to Nicholas Pitt, temp. Henry vii. (or Henry vi.), through a John Pitt, clerk of the Exchequer, temp. Elizabeth, a Thomas Pitt, seated at Blandford, Dorset, and another John Pitt, rector of Blandford, who was great-grandfather of the statesman. Lord Shelburne, who was himself a Fitzmauriee, in his autobiography says that Pitt was a younger son "of no great family." Lord Chesterfield called it a "very new family." But in the fulsome biography compiled by the Eev. Francis Thackeray — an uncle, by the way, of our great satirist — the <* respectability" of the Pitt family is vouched by the intermarriages of that house with men and women of rank and condition. The historian, whom his nephew might have classed as a " clerical snob," is indignant that the Earl of Chatham should be called a novus homo. He gives us a Sir William Pitt, 1636, ancestor of Lord Eivers, two Thomas Pitts, father and son, and a Ridgeway Pitt, all three Earls of Londonderry, uncle and cousins of the statesman. He records also another uncle, John Pitt, as marrying the sister of Viscount Fauconberg, and an aunt, Lucy, who married James, first Earl Stanhope. "Be this as it may " — to use the formula of genealogists — it is clear that the Pitts were a race which, not being of the highest influence or descent, had been allied during some generations with families of rank and name.

The most conspicuous of Chatham's ancestors was his grandfather, Thomas Pitt, who in an adventurous life of seventy-three years (1653-1726) amassed fortune and reputation abroad. There are so many traits of likeness between this bold adventurer and his grandson, that the study of atavism demands a few words on his career. Thomas Pitt as a youth engaged himself first as a sailor, and then in a miscellaneous trade in India, settled in Bengal, and for twenty years carried on a battle with the East India Company as an " interloper " on their monopoly. On one occasion he was bound over not to engage in illicit business in £40,000, on another he was fined £1000. He remained impenitent, irrepressible, and triumphant. Having brought the Company to terms, he was for twelve years Governor of Madras, which he successfullydefended against the ISTawab of the Carnatic. 1 He purchased estates in England, and was elected to the Parliaments of 1689, 1690, and 1695. From 1710 till 1715 he represented Old Sarum. He was appointed Governor of Jamaica, but he did not go out to the island. " He always knew what to do, and he did it." He was a man of indomitable energy and infinite resource, by which he amassed considerable fortune, which he invested in English estates.

Governor Pitt married Jane Innes, who, we are told, traced descent from James Stewart, Earl of Moray, natural son of James v. of Scotland; and

1 During his stay at Madras he kept up a constant search for large diamonds, from which he obtained the name of "Diamond Pitt." His great coup was the purchase of the historic Pitt diamond, which he acquired in 1701 for £20,400. He sold it in 1717 to the Regent of France for £135,000. It weighed, before cutting, 410 carats, and it now weighs 136 carats. It is the second diamond in the world, and is still preserved in the State Jewels of France in the grand Apollo Gallery of the Louvre. It was recently valued at £480,000. Under the Empire, it was set in the hilt of Napoleon's sword of ceremony. Thus, by one of the ironies of history, the stone which bought a seat in Parliament for Chatham adorned "the sword of Austerlitz," which broke the heart of Chatham's son.

patriotic Scots have made much of this legendary descent. Having amassed great fortune — and no doubt other speculations of his besides the diamond returned him seven hundred per cent, on his outlay — he settled in the West of England, and purchased from the widow of Lord Mohun, the famous duellist, the fine estate of Boconnoc in Cornwall. It lay on a tributary of the Fowey, four miles east of Lostwithiel, near the scene of the Eoyalist victory of Bradock Down in 1643. Boconnoc — which is said to have the finest grounds in the county — is, however, but incidentally connected with Chatham. He was certainly not born there, as used to be said, for he was ten years old when his grandfather purchased the estate. Governor Pitt, who died in 1726, before Chatham was eighteen, devised Boconnoc to Eobert Pitt, his eldest son, who died in the following year; and then the estate descended to Thomas, the statesman's elder brother. It passed ultimately through the Grenvilles by marriage to the Fortescue family, who scrupulously preserve the Chatham memorials and portraits that remain there.

It would appear from the Fortescue Papers {Hist. MSS. Com.) that the Governor himself was something of a rough diamond. His spelling is original, and his style abrupt. And his family seems to have been both quarrelsome and thriftless. Eobert Pitt, the father of the statesman, the eldest of three sons of Governor Pitt, married Harriet Villiers, daughter of the fifth Viscount Grandison, of Ireland. They had two sons, of whom the statesman was the younger, and five daughters. Three of these daughters married gentlemen of good estate, and one of them became Maid of Honour to Queen Caroline. The critical Lord Shelburne declared that they were profligate and mad. Thomas, the elder brother of Chatham, married the sister of the first Lord Lyttelton, of Hagley in Worcestershire, and became the father of the first Lord Camelford. Chatham himself, as we shall see, married the sister of Eichard Grenville, the first Earl Temple. This sketch will show us at once the family connections between the houses of Pitt, Villiers, Stanhope, Temple, Grenville, and Lyttelton.

It is certain from the boobs of Trinity College, Oxford, that Chatham was born in the Parish of St. James, Westminster. Along with Chaucer, Bacon, Milton, Pope, and Byron, he serves to refute Carlyle's empirical law that " it is impossible but that a Londonborn man should not be a stunted one." Of the boyhood of Chatham almost nothing is recorded, accept " a family tradition " which we fain would accept on the authority of an eminent relative. The first Earl Stanhope, general and statesman, who in courage, energy, and sagacity, bore some resemblance to Chatham, noticed the genius of the boy, his nephew by marriage, and would call him "the young Marshal." The " young Marshal " was sent to Eton at an early age, was on the foundation, and had for schoolfellows the first Lord Lyttelton, Henry Pox, the first Lord Holland, Henry Pielding, author of Tom Jones, and Charles Pratt, Lord Chancellor Camden. Lord Shelburne, his colleague, relates that Chatham was " distinguished at Eton," but that he took an unfavourable view of the school system. One of his sayings was : "He scarce observed a boy who was not cowed for life at Eton — a public school might suit a boy of a turbulent forward disposition " — a temperament which Chatham was not himself conscious that he possessed. But he certainly was not "cowed for life at Eton." From Eton he went to Trinity College, Oxford, where he entered as a gentleman-commoner in January 1727, when he was just eighteen. He was subject to gout even as a boy; and he suffered from it so severely whilst at Oxford that he left the University, and was advised to, travel. He did not take a degree, and spent some time in France and Italy. But he could not shake off the disease. During life he remained a martyr to it, and we shall see how cruelly the affliction reacted upon his whole nature and his public career.

Feeble health, we are told, made young Pitt a reader, and he gave himself to history and the classics. The Latin verses he published at Oxford on the death of George i. in 1727, if we allow for a few solecisms or misprints, are not below the standard of such college exercises. Lord Stanhope tells us that the favourite authors of the young orator were Thucydides, Demosthenes, and, in English, Bolingbroke and Barrow. He would translate the classics into fluent English prose ; he read and re-read Barrow's sermons, till he could repeat them by heart. He was also a constant reader of Spenser's Faery Queen. And he would read Shakespeare aloud to his family. Chatham never was a scholar in the strict sense: like most great orators, he was rather a poor writer, too often stilted and usually bald. Nor is there any evidence that he possessed any serious learning or natural gift for literature. But it is plain that his powerful mind had assimilated such history and poetry as was most akin to his nature. As Lord Stanhope tells us, he was early " warmed by the flame n of the records of the past and by the great books of the ancient and the modern world.

Chatham's letters show us that he was full of the familiar classics, which he quotes continually and aptly. His letters to his nephew, the first Lord Camelford, give us the picture of a noble mind well read in the best authors. He assists him in translating Virgil's Eclogues into verse. He insists on his reading the Aeneid " from beginning to ending." He hopes that he loves the Iliad and the Aeneid : they contain " lessons of honour, courage, disinterestedness, love of truth, command of temper, gentleness of behaviour, humanity, and in one word, virtue in its true signification." He recommends Locke, Burnet, Bolingbroke, Lord Clarendon's History, May on the Parliament? Lord Granville, editing these letters, very aptly quotes Milton : — "I call that a complete and generous education which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the offices both public and private, of peace and war." That complete and generous education Chatham had.

After his father's death, the elder brother having succeeded to the family estates, William Pitt embraced the profession of arms, and at the age of twenty-three he obtained a commission as Cornet in the Blues, apparently by the interest of its colonel, Lord Cobham, whose niece was the wife of his brother Thomas. Lord Chesterfield tells us that the income of the young soldier at this time was but £100 a year. Of his military career, which lasted only four years, we know nothing, nor need we indulge the speculations of his reverend panegyrist and his martial uncle that he would have gained glory as a great commander.

He applied himself to the art of war with characteristic ardour, for he told Lord Shelburne that, as Cornet, there was not a military book he had not read through. If he had any such dreams himself, they were cut short in an unexpected and quite dramatic way. On February 7, 1735, William Pitt was returned as member of Parliament for Old Sarum, the proverbial "rotten borough," which had been bought by Diamond Pitt, and had been represented by him and by Eobert Pitt, his son. William entered the House of Commons in the later years of Walpole's long administration, a time when a vehement and determined opposition was led by William Pulteney, whose party were known as the " Patriots."

The reign of Sir Eobert Walpole was now being slowly undermined, though his consummate skill as a tactician still maintained a dull, venal, fickle majority. His insatiable grasp of power had driven from his side all men of ability and force. The sinister genius of Bolingbroke scattered on all sides the seeds of discontent. Wyndham led the opposition in a tone of fierce denunciation. Townshend, Pulteney, Chesterfield, Carteret had left the veteran. His sagacious scheme of Excise had aroused such indignation in the nation that it was withdrawn to avoid an outbreak ;

but the Duke of Bolton and Lord Cobham, who opposed it, were cashiered and deprived of their regiments by a scandalous abuse of ministerial pressure. The great minister's most successful policy — peace abroad and quiet business at home — had enriched the nation by leaps and bounds, whilst it irritated the King, alarmed the patriots, and met ceaseless ridicule from the public and the press. The Prince of Wales, the unlucky " Fred " of the Memoirs, naturally became the centre of opposition to his father and his father's counsellor. Eound him gathered the leaders of the Opposition, claiming to be the true " Old Whigs of the Revolution/' whose historic policy it was to curb the power of the Crown. Swift, Pope, Gay, Thomson, and Arbuthnot supplied the malcontents with brilliancy and satire ; and both within and without the Parliament, spasmodic attempts were continually hatched to bring about a coalition with the Jacobite factions. In face of all these opponents, Sir Eobert still contrived to maintain his sinking authority by a marvellous union of courage, energy, sagacity, and tact.

It was the hour for the rise of a great orator, and the greatest orator who has ever trod the floors of Parliament had now appeared on the stage. When Sir Eichard Temple, of Stowe, had succeeded to a splendid estate and great influence by his family connections, he revived the title of Lord Cobham. His sister Hester married Eichard Grenville, and his sister Christian married Sir Thomas Lyttelton. Thomas Pitt, the elder brother, married a daughter of Sir Thomas, a sister of George, the first Lord Lyttelton, whilst

William Pitt, the Chatham that was to be, married the second Hester, the daughter of Richard Grenville, the sister of George, the first Earl Temple. This was the famous cousinhood of the "Boy Patriots," who now formed a brilliant clique in society and in Parliament. Leicester House, the abode of the Prince of Wales, was their Court. Their rendezvous in the country was the royal domain of Stowe, whose master was the uncle of George Grenville and of George Lyttelton, and whose two nieces married the two Pitts. William Pitt, Cornet in the King's own horse, entering the House of Commons as member for the family borough of Old Sarum, did not immediately show his powers. It was not till 29th April 1736 that he made his maiden speech, when he supported Pulteney's motion for an address of congratulation to the King on the marriage of Frederick, Prince of Wales. The speech has been reported with absurd encomiums by his flatterers, and is denounced as "empty and wordy" by Macaulay. Empty and wordy it is, if we look on it as the conventional compliments on a royal marriage. If we consider the circumstances and the persons, it was a political attack of curious insolence. The marriage had been forced on the Prince by the King. Congratulations were moved, not by the King's friends, but by the bitter opponent of the dominant minister. It was supported with fulsome exaggerations by the avowed partisans of the Prince, a son who hated his father, and whom both his parents detested. To rise up and talk, as young Pitt did, of the King's "tender, paternal delight in indulging" his odious heir, of "the humble request of his submissive and obedient son/' when that son was meditating rebellion and the father was meditating how to disinherit the traitor — this was not the language of official compliment. And if we imagine this fierce irony rehearsed with all the sonorous dignity and the dramatic emphasis which gave such thrilling power to Chatham's eloquence, we can easily understand the effect it produced.

At any rate the great minister took it as a formidable challenge. We know from his biographer that the debate " gave great offence and tended still further to widen the breach w — between Prince's friends and King's friends, between the minister and his opponents. The " warm panegyric bestowed on the Prince," " the cold praises given to the King " — say rather, the outrageous laudation of a mischievous fool, and the savage irony poured on a jealous monarch — struck home. Walpole, they tell us, declared, "We must muzzle this terrible Cornet of horse." Pitt was at once cashiered and his commission cancelled. Within a few weeks, " the supercession of Cornet Pitt " was recorded and filled up, as that of Lord Cobham had been cancelled three years before for opposing the Excise. Walpole had already tried seduction ; for Pitt himself told Lord Shelburne that Sir Eobert " had offered him the troop which was afterwards given to General Conway." As promises and rewards had not availed, the great corrupter now tried penalties.

Sir Robert's cynical worldly wisdom did not quite measure the heroic temper of the tiro. He did not muzzle the terrible young cornet. He merely whetted his taste for blood.

The soldier who thus had bounded into the front rank of parliamentary forces was now in his twentyeighth year. Nature had given him every physical advantage. He was tall, with an elegant and commanding figure. Grace and dignity marked every gesture and attitude. It is clear that Chatham from youth had studied to improve his natural gifts. Writing to his nephew at Cambridge, being himself a bachelor in middle life, he says, " Behaviour is of infinite advantage or prejudice to a man." " Behaviour is certainly founded in considerable virtues." " As to the carriage of your person, be particularly careful, as you are tall and thin, not to get a habit of stooping." Politeness, he says, is " benevolence in trifles or the preference of others to ourselves in little, daily, hourly occurrences in the commerce of life." " To inferiors, gentleness, condescension, and affability, is the only dignity." Good servants are "humiles Amici, fellow Christians, Conservi"

We have ample records of the orator's person. The head was small and the countenance thin; the nose was aquiline and long; the eye "that of a hawk." All the descriptions record the wonderful power of that eye, in language which would be treated as extravagant were it not that its effect is vouched by so many competent witnesses. A Catholic lawyer who had seen Pitt thus describes him in that oft-cited passage : " In his look and gesture grace and dignity were combined, but dignity presided ; the ' terrors of his beak, the lightning of his eye/ were insufferable. His voice was both full and clear ; his lowest whisper was distinctly heard, his middle tones were sweet, rich, and beautifully varied ; when lie elevated his voice to its highest pitch, the House was completely rilled with the volume of the sound. The effect was awful, except when he wished to cheer and animate ; he then had spirit-stirring notes, which were perfectly irresistible. He frequently rose, on a sudden, from a very low to a very high key, but it seemed to be without effort. His diction was remarkably simple, but words were never chosen with more care n — " the terrible was his peculiar power. Then the whole House sank before him, — still, he was dignified ; and wonderful as was his eloquence, it was attended with this most important effect, that it impressed every hearer ivith a conviction that there was something in him even finer than his words; that the man ivas infinitely greater than the orator" That is the peculiar keynote of Chatham's power of speech. It had great defects. He was called a tragedian, and no doubt he was a consummate actor. A wit declared that he was "the Cicero and the Eoscius of his age in one." His enemy, Horace Walpole, said that he was equal to Garrick. Macaulay says that " on the stage he would have been the finest Brutus or Coriolanus ever seen." He knew the instantaneous effect upon such an audience of real dramatic passion. And Chatham let his passion boil over. He was no subtle debater, artful to follow out an argument in all its reasoning and refute it step by step. But he would crush an opponent with a fierce retort, a burning sarcasm, or a thrilling appeal. His style was at times florid, forced, hyperbolic : but even then it was no piece of studied rhetoric; it was the turgid inspiration of the moment. It has been well said : " He was the slave of his own speech " — " no English orator was ever so much feared."