Opening…

Preface

In this volume I seek to describe the work of national revival carried out by William Pitt the Younger up to the time of the commencement of friction with Revolutionary France, completing the story of his life in a volume entitled “William Pitt and the Great War.” No apology is needed for an attempt to write a detailed description of his career. The task has not been essayed since the year 1862, when the fifth Earl Stanhope published his monumental work; and at that time the archives of the Foreign Office, War Office, Admiralty, and Home Office were not open for research in the period in question. Excellent monographs on Pitt were given to the world by Lord Rosebery and Mr. Charles Whibley in the years 1891 and 1906, but they were too brief to admit of an adequate treatment of the masses of new materials relating to that career. Of late these have been greatly augmented by the inclusion among the national archives of the Pitt Manuscripts, which comprise thousands of letters and memoranda hitherto little used. In recent years also the records of the Foreign Office and Home Office have become available for study, and at many points have yielded proofs of the influence which Pitt exerted on the foreign and domestic policy of Great Britain. Further, by the great kindness of the Countess Stanhope and Mr. E. G. Pretyman, M.P., I was enabled to utilize the Pitt Manuscripts preserved at Chevening and Orwell Park; and both His Grace the Duke of Portland and the Earl of Harrowby generously placed at my disposal unpublished correspondence of Pitt with their ancestors. These new sources render it necessary to reconstruct no small portion of his life.

Among recent publications bearing on this subject, the most important is that of “The Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue, Esq.,” preserved at Dropmore (Hist. MSS. Comm., 7 vols., 1892–1910), the seventh volume of which comprises details respecting the death of Pitt. This collection, containing many new letters of George III, Pitt, Lord Grenville, and British ambassadors, has proved of incalculable service. Many Memoirs, both English and foreign, have appeared of late. Among foreign historians who have dealt with this period, Sorel holds the first place; but his narrative is often defective on English affairs, to which he gave too little attention. The recent monograph of Dr. Felix Salomon on the early part of Pitt’s career (Leipzig, 1901), and those of Herren Beer, Heidrich, Luckwaldt, Uhlmann, Vivenot, and Wittichen on German affairs, have been of service, as well as those of Ballot, Chassin, and Pallain on Anglo-French relations. The bias of Lecky against Pitt detracts somewhat from the value of the latter part of his work, “England in the Eighteenth Century”; and I have been able to throw new light on episodes which he treated inadequately.

Sometimes my narrative may seem to diverge far from the immediate incidents of the life of Pitt; but the enigmas in which it abounds can be solved only by a study of the policy of his rivals or allies at Paris, The Hague, Madrid, Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. These questions have not received due attention from English students; for Lecky did not treat the period 1793–1800 except in regard to Irish affairs. Accordingly, while by no means neglecting the private and social life of Pitt, I have sought in this volume to describe his achievements during the period dominated by Catharine of Russia, Joseph of Austria, and Mirabeau. That age is also memorable for political, fiscal, and social developments of high interest; and I have dealt with them as fully as possible, often with the aid of new materials drawn from Pitt’s papers. It being impossible to extend the limits of this work, I ask the forbearance of specialists for not treating those problems more fully. It is a biography, not a series of monographs; and I have everywhere sought to keep the figure of Pitt in the foreground. New letters of George III, Pitt, Grenville, Windham, Burke, Canning, etc., which could only be referred to here, will be published in a volume entitled “Pitt and Napoleon Miscellanies,” containing also essays and notes.

I wish to thank not only those whose generous assistance I have already acknowledged, but also Mr. Hubert Hall, of the Public Record Office, for advice given during my researches; the Rev. William Hunt, D.Litt., for a thorough recension of the proofs of this work; the Masters of Trinity College and Peterhouse, Cambridge; Professor Firth, and Mr. G. P. Gooch, M.A., for valued suggestions; the Ven. Archdeacon Cunningham and Mr. Hewins for assistance on economic subjects; M. Raymond Guyot and Herr Doctor Luckwaldt for information on French and German affairs; also Mr. E. G. Pretyman, M.P., for permission to reproduce the portrait of the first Countess of Chatham; Mr. R. A. Tatton, for similar permission to include Gainsborough’s portrait of William Pitt; and last, but not least, Mr. A. M. Broadley for the communication of new letters relating to Pitt and his friends.

J. H. R.

FEBRUARY 1911.

PAGE

WILLIAM PITT AS CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER. (From a painting by Gainsborough in the possession of R. A. Tatton, Esq.) Frontispiece

LADY CHATHAM, MOTHER OF WILLIAM PITT. (From a painting in the possession of E. G. Pretyman, Esq., M.P.) 38

WILLIAM WYNDHAM, LORD GRENVILLE. (From a painting by Hoppner) 280

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. (From an unfinished painting by Sir T. Lawrence) 458

ABBREVIATIONS OF THE TITLES OF THE CHIEF WORKS REFERRED TO IN THIS VOLUME

ANN. REG. = “Annual Register.”

ASHBOURNE = “Pitt: some Chapters of his Life and Times,” by the Rt. Hon. Lord Ashbourne. 1898.

AUCKLAND JOURNALS = “The Journal and Corresp. of William, Lord Auckland.” 4 vols. 1861.

BUCKINGHAM P. = “Mems. of the Court and Cabinets of George III,” by the Duke of Buckingham. 2 vols. 1853.

B.M. ADD. MSS. = Additional Manuscripts of the British Museum.

BEAUFORT P. = “MSS. of the Duke of Beaufort,” etc. (Hist. MSS. Comm.). 1891.

CAMPBELL. = “Lives of the Lord Chancellors,” by Lord Campbell. 8 vols. 1845–69.

CASTLEREAGH CORRESP. = “Mems. and Corresp. of Viscount Castlereagh.” 8 vols. 1848-.

CHEVENING MSS. = Manuscripts of the Countess Stanhope, preserved at Chevening.

CUNNINGHAM = “Growth of Eng. Industry and Commerce (Modern Times),” by Dr. W. Cunningham. 1892.

DROPMORE P. = “The Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue, Esq., preserved at Dropmore” (Hist. MSS. Comm.). 7 vols. 1892–1910.

FORTESCUE = “The History of the British Army,” by the Hon. J. W. Fortescue. vol. iv.

HÄUSSER = “Deutsche Geschichte (1786–1804),” by L. Häusser. 4 vols. 1861–3.

HOLLAND = “Memoirs of the Whig Party,” by Lord Holland. 2 vols. 1852.

JESSE = “Mems. of the Life and Reign of George III,” by J. H. Jesse. 3 vols. 1867.

LECKY = “Hist. of England in the Eighteenth Century,” by W. E. H. Lecky. 8 vols. Fifth edit. 1891–1904.

LUCKWALDT = “Die englisch-preussische Allianz von 1788,” von F. Luckwaldt. 1902.

LEEDS MEM. = “Political Memoranda of Francis, Fifth Duke of Leeds,” ed. by Mr. O. Browning. 1884.

MALMESBURY DIARIES = “Diaries and Corresp. of the First Earl of Malmesbury.” 4 vols. 1844.

PARL. HIST. = “History of the Parliamentary Debates” (after 1804 continued in Hansard).

PELLEW = “Life and Corresp. of the first Viscount Sidmouth,” by Rev. C. Pellew. 3 vols. 1847.

PITT MSS. = Pitt MSS., preserved at H.M. Public Record Office.

PITT-RUTLAND CORRESP. = “Corresp. between ... W. Pitt and the Duke of Rutland.” 1890.

ROSE G., “DIARIES” = “Diaries and Corresp. of Rt. Hon. G. Rose.” 2 vols. 1860.

ROSE, “NAPOLEON” = “Life of Napoleon,” by J. H. Rose. 2 vols. 1909.

RUTLAND P. = “MSS. of the Duke of Rutland” (Hist. MSS. Comm.). 3 vols. 1894.

RUVILLE = “William Pitt, Earl of Chatham,” by A. von Ruville (Eng. transl.). 3 vols. 1907.

SOREL = “L’Europe et la Révolution française,” par A. Sorel. Pts. II, III. 1889, 1897.

STANHOPE = “Life of ... William Pitt,” by Earl Stanhope. 4 vols. 3rd edition. 1867.

SYBEL = “Geschichte der Revolutionzeit” (1789–1800). Eng. translation. 4 vols. 1867–9.

VIVENOT = “Quellen zur Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserpolitik Œsterreichs ...” von A. von Vivenot. 1873.

WITTICHEN = “Preussen und England in der europäischen Politik 1785–8,” von F. K. Wittichen. 1902.

WRAXALL = “Memoirs of Sir N. W. Wraxall” (1772–84), edited by H. B. Wheatley. 5 vols. 1884.

ERRATA

On page 157, l. 23, for “Richard” read “Thomas.” On page 267, ad fin., for “Bob” read “Tom.”

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WILLIAM PITT

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Introduction

ENGLAND AT THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR (1780–3)

I think it proper before I commence my proposed work to pass under review the condition of the capital, the temper of the armies, the attitude of the provinces, and the elements of weakness and strength which existed throughout the whole Empire, so that we may become conversant, not only with the vicissitudes and issues of events, which are often matters of chance, but also with their relations and causes.--TACITUS, The History, bk. i, ch. iv.

In the course of the session of 1782, when the American War was dragging to its disastrous close and a change of Ministers was imminent, one of the youngest members of the House of Commons declared that he would accept no subordinate office in a new administration. At the close of 1783, during a crisis of singular intensity, he became Chief Minister of the Crown, and thenceforth, with one short interval, controlled the destinies of Great Britain through twenty-two years marked by grave complications, both political and financial, social and diplomatic, ending in wars of unexampled magnitude. Early in the year 1806 he died of exhaustion, at the age of forty-seven. In these bald statements we may sum up the outstanding events of the life of William Pitt the Younger, which it is my aim to describe somewhat in detail.

Before reviewing his antecedents and the course of his early life, I propose to give some account of English affairs in the years when he entered on his career, so that we may picture him in his surroundings, realize the nature of the difficulties that beset him, and, as it were, feel our way along some of the myriad filaments which connect an individual with the collective activities of his age.

William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, died in 1778. His second son, named after him, began his political career at the close of the year 1780, when he was elected Member of Parliament for Appleby. The decade which then began marks a turning point in British history. Then for the first time the old self-contained life was shaken to its depths by forces of unsuspected power. Democracy, Athene-like, sprang to maturity in the New World, and threatened the stability of thrones in the Old World. For while this militant creed won its first triumphs over the soldiery of George III, it began also to colour the thoughts and wing the aspirations of the masses, especially in France, so that, even if the troops of Washington had been vanquished, the rising tide of thought would none the less have swept away the outworn barriers of class. The march of armies may be stayed; that of thought never.

The speculations enshrined in the “Social Contract” of Rousseau and the teachings of the Encyclopaedists contained much that was crude, or even false. Nevertheless, they gave an impulse such as no age ever had known, and none perhaps ever will know again. The course of the American War of Independence and the foundation of a State based on distinctly democratic principles proved that the new doctrines might lead to very practical results. The young giant now stood rooted in mother-earth.

Side by side with this portent in the world of thought and politics there came about another change. Other centuries have witnessed experiments in the direction of democracy; but in none have social speculations and their results been so closely accompanied by mechanical inventions of wonder-working potency. Here we touch on the special characteristics of the modern world. It is the product of two Revolutions, one political, the other mechanical. The two movements began and developed side by side. In 1762 Rousseau gave to the world his “Contrat Social,” the Bible of the French Revolutionists; while only two years later Hargreaves, a weaver of Blackburn, produced his spinning-jenny. In 1769 Arkwright patented his spinning-frame, and Watt patented his separate condenser. The year 1776 is memorable alike for the American Declaration of Independence, and for the publication of Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations.” In 1779 the Lancashire weaver, Crompton, produced his “mule-jenny,” a vast improvement on the machines of Arkwright and Hargreaves. The year 1785 witnessed not only the Diamond-Necklace scandal, so fatal to the prestige of the French monarchy, but also the patenting of Watt’s double-acting steam-engine and Cartwright’s “power loom.” In the year 1789, which sounded the knell of the old order of things on the Continent, there appeared the first example of the modern factory, spinning-machinery being then driven by steam power in Manchester. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, when the democratic movement had for the time gone astray and spent its force, the triumphs of science and industry continued peacefully to revolutionize human life. In 1803, the year of the renewal of war with France, William Radcliffe of Stockport greatly increased the efficiency of the power loom, and thereby cheapened the production of cloth. Finally, the year 1814 ought to be remembered, not only for the first abdication of Napoleon, but also for that peaceful and wholly beneficent triumph, George Stephenson’s “No. 1,” Killingworth locomotive.[1]

The list might be extended far beyond the limits of the period treated in this work, but enough has been said to show that the democratic and industrial forces closely synchronized at the outset, and that while the former waned the latter waxed more and more, proving in the years 1830–2 the most potent ally of English reformers in efforts which Pitt and his friends had failed to carry through in the years 1780–5. So intimate an interaction of new and potent forces had never been seen in the history of man. In truth no one but a sciolist will venture to ascribe the problems of the present age solely to the political movement which found its most powerful expression in the French Revolution. Only those can read aright the riddle of the modern sphinx who have ears for both her tones, who hearken not only to the shouts of leaders and the roar of mobs, but also listen for the multitudinous hum of the workshop, the factory, and the mine.

* * * * *

The lot of William Pitt the Younger was cast in the years when both these revolutions began their mighty work. The active part of his father’s career fell within the old order of things; the problems which confronted Chatham were merely political. They therefore presented none of that complexity which so often baffled the penetration and forethought of his son. It is true that, with a prophetic vision of the future, the old man foretold in thrilling words the invincibility of the American cause, but then his life-work was done; from his Pisgah-mount he could only warn, and vainly warn, the dwellers in the plain below. His son was destined to enter that unknown land; and he entered it when his people were burdened by debt, disaster, and disgrace.

What were the material resources of the nation? Were they equal to the strain imposed by a disastrous war? Could they resist the subtly warping influences of the coming age? The questions closely concern us in our present inquiry. For the greatness of a statesman is not to be assessed merely by an enumeration of his legislative, diplomatic, and warlike successes. There is a truer method of valuation than this haphazard avoir-dupois. It consists in weighing his achievements against his difficulties.

It is well, therefore, to remember that the British people of the year 1780 was a small and poor people, if we compare it not merely with modern standards (a method fallacious for the present inquiry), but with the burdens which it had to bear. The population of England and Wales at that time has been computed a little over 7,800,000; that of Scotland was perhaps about 1,400,000. That of Ireland is even less known. The increase of population in England and Wales during the years 1770–80 exceeded eight per cent., a rate less, indeed, than that of the previous decade, which had been one of abounding prosperity, but surpassing that of any previous period for which credible estimates can be framed.[2]

The wealth of the nation seems also to have suffered little decline; and after the conclusion of peace in 1783 it showed a surprising elasticity owing to causes which will soon be considered. But in the years 1780–3 there was a universal conviction that the burden of debt and taxation was unendurable. Parliament in 1781 voted the enormous sum of £25,353,857 for Ways and Means, an increase of £814,060 on the previous year. As the finances and debt of Ireland were kept entirely separate up to the end of the century, this burden fell upon some 9,200,000 persons, and involved a payment of about £2 15s. per head, an amount then deemed absolutely crushing.

But two important facts should be remembered: firstly, that the investments of British capital in oversea undertakings, which are now enormous, were (apart from the British East and West Indies) practically non-existent in the year 1780, Great Britain being then an almost self-sufficing unit financially; secondly, that modern methods of taxation are less expensive in the collection and less burdensome to the taxpayer than those prevalent in that non-scientific era. The revenue of 1781 included the following items: £12,480,000 for “Annuities and Lottery,” £2,788,000 for “Certain Surpluses of the Sinking Fund,” £2,000,000 Bank Charter, and so on. Only about one fourth of the requisite amount was raised by means that would now be considered sound.[3]

The National Debt was then reckoned at £177,206,000; and the annual interest, amounting to £6,812,000, ate up considerably more than one fourth of the “bloated estimates” of that year. The burden of debt seemed appalling to that generation; and the Three per cent. Consols sank from 60¼ in January 1781 to 55 in November. But further blows were soon to be dealt by Ministers at the nation’s credit; and the same stock ranged between 56 and 58 when William Pitt became Prime Minister in December 1783. Predictions of national bankruptcy were freely indulged in; and it should be remembered that Great Britain, vanquished by a mighty Coalition and bereft of her most valuable colonies, seemed far more likely to sink into the gulf of bankruptcy than triumphant France. The events of the next six years turned essentially on the management of the finances of the rival Powers by Pitt and by the Controllers-General of Versailles. Apart from the personal questions at issue, the history of that time affords the most instructive proof that victory may bear within itself the seeds of future disease and collapse; while a wise use of the lessons of adversity may lead the vanquished to a lease of healthier life.

* * * * *

If we turn our gaze away from the material resources of Great Britain to the institutions and sentiments of our forefathers, there will appear many bizarre contrasts and perplexing symptoms. At first sight the self-contained, unreceptive, torpid society of the Georgian era might appear to be wholly unfitted to bear the triple strain of a serious national disaster, and of the warping influences of the new democracy and the new industrialism. The situation was indeed most alarming: “What a dismal fragment of an Empire!” wrote Horace Walpole in June 1780, “Yet would that moment were come when we are to take a survey of our ruins.” In truth, had the majority of Britons been addicted to morbidly introspective broodings, they would have been undone. There are times when a nation is saved by sheer stolidity; and this characteristic alike in monarch and people, which was responsible for the prolongation of the war, helped to avert collapse at its close. The course of the narrative will show that the brains of Englishmen were far from equal to the task of facing the problems of the age then dawning; but Englishmen were equal to the task of bearing the war-burdens manfully, and thus were able to supply the material out of which Pitt, aided by the new manufacturing forces, could work financial marvels.

Then again, British institutions offered that happy mixture of firmness and adaptability which at many crises has been the salvation of the race. Had they been as rigid as those of Sparta they must have cracked and fallen asunder; had they been as fluid as those of Athens they might have mouldered away. But, like the structure of English society of which they form the framework, they lend themselves to reverent restoration, and thwart all efforts at reckless innovation. Sir Henry Maine happily assessed the worth of this truly national safeguard in the statement that our institutions had, however undesignedly, arrived at a state in which satisfaction and impatience, the chief sources of political conduct, were adequately called into play. Of this self-adjusting process Pitt, at least during the best years of his career, was to be the sage director.

There were many reasons why Englishmen should be a prey alternately to feelings of satisfaction and discontent. Instinct and tradition bade them be loyal to the throne and to the institutions of their fathers. Reason and reflection bade them censure the war policy of George III and the means whereby he sought to carry it through to the bitter end. St. Stephen’s, Westminster, had been the shrine of the nation’s liberties; it now, so Burke declared, threatened them with a slow and inglorious extinction. Obedience to the laws had ever been the pride of the nation; but now that virtue might involve subservience to a corrupt and greedy faction.

Yet however great the provocations, Britons were minded to right these wrongs in their own way, and not after the fashions set at Geneva or Paris. In truth they had one great advantage denied to Continental reformers. At Paris reform almost necessarily implied innovation; for, despite the dictum of Burke to the contrary, it is safe to say that the relics of the old constitution of France offered no adequate basis on which to reconstruct her social and political fabric. In England the foundations and the walls were in good repair. The structure needed merely extension, not rebuilding. Moreover, British reformers were by nature and tradition inclined towards tentative methods and rejected wholesale schemes. Even in the dull years of George II the desire for a Reform of Parliament was not wholly without expression; and now, at the time of the American War, the desire became a demand, which nearly achieved success. In fact, the Reform programme of 1780 satisfied the aspirations of the more moderate men, even in the years 1791–4, when the excitements of the French Revolution, and the writings of Thomas Paine for a time popularized the levelling theories then in vogue at Paris.

Certainly, before the outbreak of the French Revolution, the writings of Continental thinkers had little vogue in Great Britain. The “Social Contract” of Rousseau was not widely known, and its most noteworthy theses, despite the fact that they were borrowed from Hobbes and Locke, aroused no thrill of sympathy. This curious fact may be explained by the innate repugnance of the islanders alike to the rigidly symmetrical form in which the Genevese prophet clothed his dogmas, and to the Jacobins’ claim for them of universal applicability. The very qualities which carried conviction to the ardent and logic-loving French awakened doubts among the cooler northern folk.

Then again, however sharp might be the resentment against George III for this or that action, national sentiment ran strongly in the traditional channels. After the collapse of the Stuart cause loyalty to the throne and to the dynasty was the dominant feeling among all classes. As Burke finely said of the Tories after the accession of George III, “they changed their idol but they preserved their idolatry.” The personality of George III was such as to help on this transformation. A certain bonhomie, as of an English squire, set off by charm of manner and graciousness of speech,[4] none too common in that class, went to the hearts of all who remembered the outlandish ways of the first two Georges. Furthermore, his morals were distinctly more reputable than theirs, as was seen at the time of his youth, when he withstood the wiles strewn in his path by several ladies of the Court with a frankness worthy of the Restoration times.[5] His good sense, straightforwardness, and his love of country life and of farming endeared him both to the masses of the people and to the more select circles which began to learn from Versailles the cult of Rousseau and the charms of butter making. Queen Charlotte, a princess of the House of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, also set her face against vice and extravagance, but in a primly austere manner which won few to the cause of virtue. Domesticity in her ceased to be alluring. Idle tongues wagged against her even when she sought to encourage the wearing of dresses woven in Spitalfields rather than those of ever-fashionable Paris; or again, when she prohibited the wearing of ostrich feathers at Court.[6]

The reader will fail to understand the political life of that time and the difficulties often besetting Pitt until he grasps the fact that George III not only reigned but governed. His long contest with the Whig factions left him victor; and it is singular that the shortsightedness of the elder Pitt signally aided the King in breaking up their power. Both of them aimed at overthrowing the supremacy of the old Whig families, but it was George III who profited by the efforts of the Earl of Chatham.[7] The result was seen in the twelve years of almost personal rule (1770–82), during which Lord North and the well-fed phalanx of the King’s Friends bade fair to make the House of Commons the mere instrument of the royal will. The King’s influence, impaired for a time by the disasters of the American War, asserted itself again at the time of the Lord George Gordon Riots in June 1780. That outbreak of bigotry and rascality for a time paralyzed with fear both Ministers and magistrates; but while all around him faltered, George III held firm and compelled the authorities to act.[8] The riots were quelled, but not before hundreds of drunken desperadoes had perished in the flames which they had kindled. Those who saw large parts of London ablaze long retained a feeling of horror at all popular movements, and looked upon George III as the saviour of society. This it was, in part, which enabled him to retain his influence scarcely impaired even by the disasters of the American War. The monarchy stood more firmly rooted than at any time since the reign of Queen Anne. Jacobitism survived among a few antiquated Tories, like Dr. Johnson, as a pious belief or a fashionable affectation; but even in the year 1763 the lexicographer, after receiving a pension from George III, avowed to Boswell that the pleasure of cursing the House of Hanover and of drinking King James’s health was amply overbalanced by an income of three hundred pounds.

As a sign of the reality of the royal power, we may note that public affairs were nearly at a stand-still at the time of the lunacy of George III (November 1788 to February 1789). The following Foreign Office despatch, sent to the British Ambassador at Berlin at a critical time in our diplomatic relations, shows that Pitt and the Foreign Secretary, the Marquis of Carmarthen, considered themselves the King’s Secretaries of State, and unable to move until the royal will was known:

Whitehall, January 6 1789.

TO MR. EWART,

SIR,

I have received your letters up to No. 93, but I have not any commands to convey to you at present, the unhappy situation of His Majesty’s health making it impossible for me to lay them before him. The present situation of this country renders it impossible for me to send you any particular or precise instructions. I trust, however, that the system for supplying the present unfortunate interruption in the executive part of the Government will be speedily completed, at least with as little delay as the importance of the object will admit of, and which, being once more formed, will of course restore that part of the Constitution to its usual energy and effect.[9]

Ewart and our other ambassadors were therefore urged to mark time as energetically as might be; and no orders were sent to them until after 17th February 1789, when the King began to recover.

At ordinary times, then, the King’s authority was looked upon as essential to the working of the Government, a fact which explains the eager interest, even of men not place-hunters, in the Regency disputes of 1788–9. In truth, the monarchy was the central fact of the nation’s life; and, as it acquired stedfastness from the personal popularity of George III, the whole of the edifice had a solidity unknown in the years 1680–1760.[10]

* * * * *

Montesquieu praised the English constitution as providing without undue friction a balance of power between King, Lords, and Commons. This judgment (penned in 1748) still held good, though the royal authority had in the meantime certainly increased. But the power of the nobles was still very great. They largely controlled the House of Commons. The Lowthers secured the election of 11 Members in the Lake District; and through the whole country 71 Peers were able directly to nominate, and secure the election of, 88 commoners, while they powerfully influenced the return of 72 more. If we include all landowners, whether titled on untitled, it appears that they had the power to nominate 487 members out of the 658 who formed the House of Commons.

In these days, when the thought and activities of the towns overbear those of the country districts, we cry out against a system that designedly placed power in the hands of nobles and squires. But we must remember that the country then far outweighed the towns in importance; that the produce of the soil was far more valuable than all the manufactures; and that stability and stolidity are the characteristics of an ancient society, based on agriculture and reared in Feudalism. If we except that metropolitan orgy, the Wilkes’ affair, London and Westminster were nearly as torpid politically as Dorset. Even in the year 1791 the populace of Manchester and Birmingham blatantly exulted in a constitution which left them without any direct voice in Parliament. It was in the nature of things that Grampound, Old Sarum, Gatton, and Castle Rising should return eight members; the choice of the Tudor Sovereigns had lit upon those hamlets or villages as test-places for consulting the will of the nation, and the nation acquiesced, because, even if Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and Sheffield had enjoyed that privilege, they would probably have sent up country gentlemen of the same type, and after a far greater output of money and beer. Where the will of the nation is almost entirely homogeneous there is no injustice in selecting representatives by the haphazard methods then in use.

Strong in their control of Parliament, the nobles sought to hem in the throne by meshes of influence through which even the masterful and pertinacious George III could with difficulty break. Their circle was small. True, they had failed in their effort of 1719 to limit the number of creations at any one time to six; but jealousy had almost the force of law. Ultimately we find George III declining to confer a dukedom on any but princes of the blood, and Pitt incurred the displeasure of his cousin, Earl Temple, because he failed to bend the royal will on that question. The need of caution in respect to the granting of titles may be inferred from the Pitt Papers, no small part of which refer to requests for these honours. Pitt has been reproached with his lavish use of this governmental device, for he created about 140 peerages in the years 1783–1801. I have, however, found proofs that he used it reluctantly. In the Pitt Papers are several letters which the statesman wrote refusing requests for peerages. On this matter, as also with regard to places and appointments, he treated any attempt at bargaining with cold disdain, witness this crushing reply to an Irish peer who, in September 1799, applied for a British peerage: “... There is a passage in the conclusion of your Lordship’s letter on which it is impossible for me not to remark that it appears to convey an intimation with respect to what may be your political conduct, which would at all events induce me to decline being the channel of bringing your application before His Majesty.”[11]

But rebukes and refusals seem to have made little impression on that generation, imbued as it was with a deep-seated belief that the victors had a right to the spoils and should apportion them among their followers according to rank and usefulness. The whole matter was spoken of under the convenient euphemism “influence,” which, when used in a political sense, denoted the secret means for assuring the triumph of the Crown and the reward of the faithful. While not implying actual bribery, it signified persuasion exerted through peerages, places, and pensions. According to this scheme of things, strenuous support of “the King’s cause” would earn a title, a bishopric, a judgeship, or a receivership in the customs or excise. These allurements offered irresistible attractions in an age which offered far fewer means of independent advancement than the present. With the exception of those strange persons who preferred to make their own way in life, men of all classes had their eyes fixed on some longed-for perch above them, and divided their attention between the symptoms of decay in its occupant and the signs of the favour of its patron. The expectant part of Society resembled a gigantic hen-roost at the approach of evening, except that the aspirations upward were not signs of quiescence but of ill-suppressed unrest. Those who delve among the confidential letters of that time must often picture the British nation as a mountain-climber. Perhaps one sixth part of Pitt’s time was taken up in reading and answering requests of bewildering variety. College friends dunned him with requests for preferment, with or without cure of souls. Rectors longed to be canons; canons to be deans; deans to be bishops; and wealthy bishops coveted sinecure deaneries, among which, curiously enough, that of London was the greatest prize. The infection spread to all classes. Gaugers of beer longed to be collectors of His Majesty’s revenue; faithful grooms confidently expected a gaugership; and elderly fishermen, who in their day had intercepted smugglers, demanded, as of right, the post of harbourmaster. A Frenchman once defended the old régime on the ground that it ranged all classes about the King in due gradations of privilege. Similarly Britons of their own free will grouped themselves around the throne on steps of expectancy.

A curious example of the motives which led to influential requests for preferment in the Church is to be found in the correspondence of the Marquis of Carmarthen (afterwards Duke of Leeds), who was at that time Foreign Secretary under Pitt. His letter to his chief may speak for itself:

Private.

Grosvenor Square, Nov. 13 1787.[12]

MY DEAR SIR,

I fear it will not be in my power to return to Hollwood to-day, by which I shall be prevented from so soon troubling you viva voce with the only subject I do not like to converse with you upon, viz., asking for Preferment. But my anxiety for my friend Jackson, and understanding that the Bishopric of Chester is not yet given away, will, I hope, plead my excuse to you for asking it for him, and perhaps you may forgive me adding that from local circumstances that preferment in his hands would be particularly agreeable to me, on account of a large part of my northern property being situated in the Diocese of Chester. I do assure you that a compliance with this request would make me truly happy.

Believe me, etc. CARMARTHEN.

Reverting to matters which are purely secular, we may note that in the year 1783, at the time of Pitt’s assumption of power, the number of English peers was comparatively small, namely about 240, and of these 15, being Roman Catholics, could not sit in Parliament.[13]

This select aristocracy was preserved from some of the worst evils incident to its station by healthful contact with men and affairs. The reversion of its younger sons to the rank of commoners prevented the formation of the huge caste of nobles, often very poor but always intensely proud, which crusted over the surface of society in Continental lands; and again, the infusion of commoners (generally the ablest governors, soldiers, and lawyers of the age) preserved the Order from intellectual stagnation such as had crept over the old noblesse of France. Both the downward and the upward streams kept the mass free from that decay which sooner or later besets every isolated body. Nor did the British aristocracy enjoy those flagrant immunities from taxation which were the curse of French social and political life.

But let us view this question in a more searching light. Montesquieu finely observes that an aristocracy may maintain its full vigour, if the laws be such as will habituate the nobles more to the perils and fatigues, than to the pleasures, of command.[14] In this respect the British aristocracy ran some risk of degeneration. It is true that its members took an active part in public business. Their work in the House of Lords was praiseworthy. The debates there, if less exciting than those of the Commons, bear signs of experience, wisdom, dignity, and self-restraint, which were often lacking in the Lower House. The nobles also took a large share in the executive duties of the State. Not only did they and their younger sons fill most of the public offices, including the difficult, and often thankless, diplomatic posts, but they were active in their counties and on their estates, as lords-lieutenant, sheriffs, and magistrates. The days had not yet come when “Society” fled from the terrors of the English winter. For the most part nobles spent the parliamentary vacations at their country seats, sharing in the duties and sports which from immemorial times had knit our folk into a compact and sturdy whole. Yet we may question whether the pleasures of command did not then far exceed its perils and fatigues. Apart from the demoralizing struggle for higher honours, there were hosts of court and parliamentary sinecures to excite cupidity and encourage laziness. The rush after emoluments and pleasure became keener than ever after the glorious peace of 1763, and a perusal of the letters addressed to any statesman of the following age must awaken a doubt whether public life was less corrupt than at the time of Walpole.

Then, again, in the making and working of laws, the privileges of the nobles and gentry were dangerously large. Throughout the eighteenth century those classes strengthened their grip both on Parliament and on the counties and parishes. Up to the year 1711 no definite property qualification was required from members of Parliament; but in that year a law was passed limiting the right of representing counties to those who owned land worth £600 a year; and a rental of half that sum was expected from members of boroughs. This was equivalent to shutting out merchants and manufacturers, who were often Dissenters, from the county representation; and the system of pocket boroughs further enabled landowners to make a careful choice in the case of a large part of the members of towns. Again, the powers of the magistrates, or justices of the peace, in the affairs of the parish, were extraordinarily large. A French writer, M. Boutmy, computes them as equalling those of the préfet, the conseil d’arrondissement, the maire, the commissaire de police, and the juge de paix, of the French local government of to-day. Of course the Shallows of Pitt’s time did not fulfil these manifold duties at all systematically; for that would be alien to the haphazard ways of the squires and far beyond their talents. Local despotism slumbered as much as it worked; and just as the Armenians prefer the fitful barbarities of the Turks to the ever-grinding pressure of the Russian bureaucracy, so the villagers of George III’s reign may have been no more oppressed than those of France and Italy are by a system fruitful in good works and jobs, in officials and taxes. On this point it is impossible to dogmatize; for the Georgian peasantry was dumb until the years after Waterloo, when Cobbett began to voice its feelings.

The use of the term “despotism” for the rule of the squires is no exaggeration. They were despots in their own domains. Appeals against the rulings of the local magistrates were always costly and generally futile. It was rare to find legal advisers at their side; and the unaided wits of local landowners decided on all the lesser crimes (many of them punishable with death at the assizes) and the varied needs of the district. With the justices of the peace it lay to nominate the guardians of the poor and “visitors,” who supervised the relief of the poor in the new unions of parishes resulting from Gilbert’s Act of 1782. The working of the Draconian game-laws was entirely in their hands, and that, too, in days when the right of sporting with firearms was limited to owners of land worth £100 a year. Finally, lest there should be any community of sentiment between the bench and the dock, at the oft-recurring trials for poaching, the same land and money test was applied to all applicants for the honoured post of magistrate. The country gentlemen ruled the parish and they virtually ruled the nation.[15] The fact was proclaimed with characteristic insolence by the Lord Justice Clerk, Macqueen of Braxfield, in his address to the jury at the close of the trial of Thomas Muir for sedition, at Edinburgh in August 1793: “A Government in every country should be just like a Corporation; and in this Country it is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to be represented. As for the rabble, who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation upon them? What security for the payment of their taxes? They may pack up all their property on their backs and leave the country in the twinkling of an eye. But landed property cannot be removed.”[16] The Scottish nobles, especially in the Highlands, still claimed extensive rights over their vassals; and several of them made patriotic use of these powers in raising regiments during the great war with France. Thomas Graham, afterwards Lord Lynedoch, is the best known example of this feudal influence.[17]

In many districts the squires received unwelcome but powerful support from “nabobs.” Those decades witnessed a steady flight homewards of Indian officials, for the most part gorged with plunder. They became an appreciable force in politics. Reckless of expense so long as they could enter the charmed circle of the higher gentry, they adopted the politics and aped the ways of their betters; so that many a countryside felt the influence of their greed and ostentation. The yeomen and villagers were the victims of their land-hunger; while the small squires (so says Grose in his Olio of the year 1792) often fell in the course of the feverish race for display. As the Roman moralist inveighed against the influx of Syrian ways into the life of his city, so too might Johnson have thundered at the blending of the barbaric profusion of the Orient with the primal simplicity of the old English life.

For the most part, however, that life still showed the tenacity that marks our race. Certainly in Court circles there were no signs of the advent of commercialism, still less of democracy. The distinctions of rank in England seemed very strict, even to a German, who was accustomed to the formalities of the Hanoverian and Rhenish Courts. Count von Kielmansegge in 1761 noted the precision of etiquette at the State balls: “Rank in England is decided exclusively according to class, and not according to service; consequently the duchesses dance first, then marchionesses, then dukes’ daughters, then countesses. Foreigners had no rank at all in England, so they may not dance before the lords and barons.... For this reason foreigners seldom dance at Court.” It was not etiquette for the King and Queen to dance at the state balls; but, even so, the formalism of those functions must have been pyramidal. The same spirit of formality, fortified by a nice sense of the gradations of rank, appears in the rules of a county club at Derby, where the proceedings seem to have been modelled on the sun and planets, the latter being always accompanied by inferior satellites.[18]

The customs of the beau monde in London were regulated by one all-absorbing preoccupation, that of killing time in a gentlemanly and graceful manner. Fielding, in his “Joseph Andrews,” thus maps out the day of a fop about the middle of the century:

In the morning I rose, took my great stick, and walked out in my green frock, with my hair in papers, and sauntered about till ten. Went to the Auction; told Lady B. she had a dirty face, laughed heartily at something Captain G. said (I can’t remember what, for I did not very well hear it), whispered to Lord ----, bowed to the Duke of ----, and was going to bid for a snuff-box, but did not, for fear I should have had it. From 2 to 4 dressed myself; 4 to 6 dined; 6 to 8 coffee-house; 8 to 9 Drury Lane Playhouse; 10 to 12 Drawing-room.

The sketch of West End life given by Moritz, a Prussian pastor who visited England in 1782, is very similar, but he enters into more detail. He describes fashionable people as walking about all the morning in a négligé attire, “your hair not dressed but merely rolled up in rollers, and in a frock and boots.” The morning lasted till four or five o’clock, then the fashionable time for dinner. The most usual dress in that summer was a coat of very dark blue, a short white waistcoat, and white silk stockings. Black was worn for full dress, and Moritz noticed that the English seemed to prefer dark colours. Dress seemed to him to be one of the chief aims and occupations of our people; and he remarked on the extraordinary vogue which everything French then enjoyed.

One is tempted to pause here and dwell on the singular fact that, at the time when England and France were still engaged in deadly strife, each people should be intent on copying the customs and fashions of the other. The decade of the “eighties” witnessed the growth of “Anglomania” to ridiculous proportions in France; while here the governing class thought it an unfailing proof of good breeding to trick out every other sentence with a French phrase. Swift alone could have done justice to the irony of a situation wherein two great nations wasted their resources in encompassing one another’s ruin, while every day their words and actions bore striking witness to their admiration of the hereditary foe. Is it surprising that Pitt should have used all his efforts in 1786 to bring about an entente cordiale on the basis of the common interests of the two peoples?

To revert to our theme: the frivolities and absurdities of Mayfair, which figure so largely in the diaries and letters of the period, probably filled a smaller space in the life of the nation than we are apt to infer from those sources. Moritz, who had an eye for the homely as well as the courtly side of life, noticed the good qualities which kept the framework of society sound. He remarked that in London, outside the Court circles, the customs were plain and domestic, the people generally dined about three o’clock, and worked hard.[19] His tour on foot through the Midlands also gave him the impression that England enjoyed a well-balanced prosperity. He was everywhere pitied or despised, it being assumed that a pedestrian must be a tramp. There can be little doubt that even at the end of that disastrous war, our land was far more prosperous than any of the States of North Germany.

The wealth of the proud islanders was nowhere more obvious than at the chief pleasure resorts of Londoners, Vauxhall and Ranelagh. These gardens and promenades impressed Moritz greatly, and he pronounced the scene at the rotunda at Ranelagh the most brilliant which he had ever witnessed: “The incessant change of faces, the far greater number of which were strikingly beautiful, together with the illumination, the extent and majestic splendour of the place, with the continued sound of the music, makes an inconceivably delightful impression.” Thanks to the curiosity of the Prussian pastor, we can look down with him on the gay throng, and discern the princes, lords, and knights, their stars far outshining all the commoners present; we see also a difference in the styles of wearing the hair, the French queues and bags contrasting markedly with plain English heads of hair or professional wigs. Most of the company moved in “an eternal circle, to see and to be seen”; others stood near to enjoy the music; others again regaled themselves at the tables with the excellent fare provided for the inclusive sum of half-a-crown; while a thoughtful minority gazed from the gallery and moralized on the scene. The display and extravagance evidently surprised Moritz, as it surprises us when we remember that it was at the close of a ruinous war. In the third year of the struggle, the mercurial Horace Walpole deplored the universal distress, and declared that when he sat in his “blue window,” he missed nine out of ten of the lordly chariots that used to roll before it. Yet, in the seventh year, when the half of Europe had entered the lists against the Island Power, the Prussian pastor saw nothing but affluence and heard nothing that did not savour of a determined and sometimes boastful patriotism. At Ranelagh he observed that everyone wore silk stockings, and he was informed that even poor people when they visited that abode of splendour, dressed so as to copy the great, and always hired a coach in order to draw up in state at the entrance.[20]

Ranelagh and Vauxhall, we may note in passing, were beyond the confines of the London of 1780. The city of Westminster was but slowly encroaching on Tothill Fields; and the Queen’s House, standing on the site of the present Buckingham Palace, commanded an uninterrupted view westwards over the fields and market gardens spreading out towards the little village of Chelsea. On the south of the Thames there was a mere fringe of houses from the confines of Southwark to the Archbishop’s palace at Lambeth; and revellers returning from Vauxhall, whether by river or road, were not seldom sobered by visits from footpads, or the even more dreaded Mohawks. Further afield everything was completely rural. Trotter, Fox’s secretary, describes the statesman as living amidst bowers vocal with song-birds at St. Ann’s Hill, Wandsworth; and Pitt, in his visits to Wilberforce or Dundas at Wimbledon, would probably pass not a score of houses between Chelsea and the little old wooden bridge at Putney. That village and Wimbledon stood in the same relation to London as Oxshott and Byfleet occupy to-day. North of Chelsea there was the hamlet of Knightsbridge, and beyond it the villages of Paddington and “Marybone.”

As Hyde Park Corner marked the western limit of London, so Bedford House and its humbler neighbour, the British Museum, bounded it on the north. The Foundling Hospital stood in open fields. St. Pancras, Islington Spa, and Sadler’s Wells were rivals of Epsom and Tunbridge Wells. Clerkenwell Church was the fashionable place for weddings for the richer citizens who dwelt in the northern suburbs opened up by the new City Road completed in 1761. On the east, London ended at Whitechapel, though houses straggled on down the Mile End Road. The amount of the road-borne traffic is curiously illustrated by the fact that the Metropolis possessed only three bridges, London Bridge, Westminster Bridge, and Blackfriars Bridge; and not till the year 1763 did the City Fathers demolish the old houses standing on London Bridge which rendered it impossible for two carts to pass. Already, however, suburbs were spreading along the chief roads out of London. In the “Connoisseur” of September 1754 is a pleasingly ironical account of a week-end visit to the villa of a London tradesman, situated in the desolate fields near Kennington Common, from the windows of which one had a view of criminals hanging from gibbets and St. Paul’s cupola enveloped in smoke.

Nevertheless, the Englishman’s love of the country tended to drive Londoners out to the dull little suburbs around the Elephant and Castle, or beyond Tyburn or Clerkenwell; and thus, in the closing years of the century, there arose that dualism of interests (city versus suburbs) which weakens the civic and social life of the metropolis. A further consequence was the waning in popularity of Vauxhall and Ranelagh, as well as of social clubs in general. These last had furnished a very desirable relief to the monotony of a stay-at-home existence. But the club became less necessary when the family lived beyond the river or at “Marybone,” and when the merchant spent much time on horseback every day in passing from his office to his villa. Another cause for the decline of clubs of the old type is doubtless to be found in the distress caused by the Revolutionary War, and in the increasing acerbity of political discussions after the year 1790. Hitherto clubs had been almost entirely devoted to relaxation or conviviality. A characteristic figure of Clubland up to the year 1784 had been Dr. Johnson, thundering forth his dicta and enforcing them with thumps on the table. The next generation cared little for conversation as a fine art; and men drifted off to clubs where either loyalty or freedom was the dominant idea. The political arena, which for two generations had been the scene of confused scrambles between greedy factions, was soon to be cleared for that deadliest of all struggles, a war of principles. In that sterner age the butterfly life of Ranelagh became a meaningless anomaly.

For the present, however, no one in England dreamt of any such change. The spirit of the nation, far from sinking under the growing burdens of the American War, seemed buoyant. Sensitive littérateurs like Horace Walpole might moan over the ruin of the Empire; William Pitt might declaim against its wickedness with all his father’s vehemence; but the nation for the most part plodded doggedly on in the old paths and recked little of reform, except in so far as it concerned the abolition of sinecures and pensions. In 1779–80 County Associations were founded in order to press on the cause of “œconomical reform”; but most of them expired by the year 1784. Alike in thought and in customs England seemed to be invincibly Conservative.

The reasons, other than racial and climatic, for the stolidity of Georgian England would seem to be these. Any approach to enthusiasm, whether in politics or religion, had been tabooed as dangerous ever since the vagaries of the High Church party in the reign of Anne had imperilled the Protestant Succession; and far into the century, especially after the adventure of “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” all leanings towards romance were looked on as a reflection on the safe and solid House of Brunswick. Prudence was the first of political virtues, and common sense the supreme judge of creeds and conduct.

External events also favoured the triumph of the commonplace, which is so obvious in the Georgian literature and architecture. The call of the sea and the influence of the New World were no longer inspirations to mighty deeds. The age of adventure was past, and the day of company promoters and slave-raiders had fully dawned. Commerce of an almost Punic type ruled the world. Whereas the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had turned mainly on questions of religion, those of the eighteenth centred more and more on the winning of colonial markets as close preserves for the mother-country. By the Peace of Utrecht (1713) England gained the first place in the race for Empire; and a clause of that treaty enabled her to participate in the most lucrative of trades, the kidnapping of negroes in Africa for the supply of Spanish-America. Never was there a more fateful gain. It built up the fortunes of many scores of merchants and shipowners, but it degraded the British marine and the populace of our ports, in some of which slaves were openly sold. The canker of its influence spread far beyond ships and harbours. Its results were seen in the seared conscience of the nation, and in the lowering of the sense of the sanctity of human life, which in its turn enabled the blind champions of law, especially after the scare of 1745, to multiply capital punishments until more than 160 crimes were punishable by death.

The barbarities of the law and the horrors of the slave-trade finally led to protests in the name of humanity and religion. These came in the first instance from the Society of Friends.[21] But the philanthropic movement did not gather volume until it was fed by the evangelical revival. Clarkson, Zachary Macaulay, Wilberforce (the ablest champion of the cause), and John Howard, the reformer of prisons, were living proofs of the connection which exists between spiritual fervour and love of man. With the foundation, in the year 1787, of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the philanthropic movement began its career of self-denying effort, which for some five years received valuable support from Pitt. Other signs of a moral awakening were not wanting. In 1772 Lord Chief Justice Mansfield declared that all slaves brought to the United Kingdom became free--a judgement which dealt the death-blow to slave markets in this country. In 1773 John Howard began his crusade for the improvement of gaols; and seven years later Sunday Schools were started by Robert Raikes. The protests of Burke and Sir Charles Bunbury against the pillory, the efforts of the former in 1784–5 to prevent the disgraceful overcrowding of the prisons, and the crusade of Romilly against the barbarities of the penal code are also a tribute to the growth of enlightenment and kindliness.

These ennobling efforts, however, failed to make any impression on what is termed “Society.” The highest and the lowest strata are, as a rule, the last to feel the thrill of new movements; for surfeit and starvation alike stunt the better instincts. Consequently, Georgian England became strangely differentiated. The new impulses were quickly permeating the middle classes; but there their influence ceased. The flinty hardness of the upper crust, and the clayey sediment at the bottom, defied all efforts of an ordinary kind. The old order of things was not to be changed save by the explosive forces let loose in France in 1789. That year forms a dividing line in European history, as it does in the career of William Pitt.

* * * * *

Though ominous signs of the approaching storm might already be seen, the noble and wealthy wasted their substance in the usual round of riotous living. It may be well to glance at two of the typical vices of the age, drinking and gambling, of course in those circles alone where they are deemed interesting, for thence only do records reach us.

Drinking did not count as a vice, it was a cherished custom. The depths of the potations after dinner, and on suitable occasions during the day, had always been a feature of English life. Shakespeare seems to aim these well-known lines at the English rather than the Danes:

This heavy-headed revel east and west Makes us traduced and tax’d of other nations: They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase Soil our addition.[22]

Certainly in the eighteenth century drinking came to be in a sense a flying buttress of the national fabric. The champions of our “mercantile system” brought about the signature of the Methuen Treaty of 1703 with Portugal, in order to favour trade with that harmless little land at the expense of that with our “natural enemy,” France. Hostility to the French being the first of political maxims, good citizens thought it more patriotic to became intoxicated on port wine than to remain sober on French claret. Though we may not endorse Adam Smith’s hopeful prediction that the abolition of all duties on wine would have furthered the cause of temperance, yet we may agree that the drunkenness of the age was partly due to “the sneaking arts of underling tradesmen”--when “erected into political maxims for the conduct of a great empire.” Equally noteworthy is his verdict that drunkenness was not limited to people of fashion, and that “a gentleman drunk with ale has scarce ever been seen among us.”[23]

The habit of tippling, which even the moralist Johnson (aet. 70) said might “be practised with great prudence,” was everywhere dominant. The thinness and unpracticality of the studies at the old universities were relieved by the depth and seriousness of the potations. The phrase, “a port wine Fellow,” lingered to the close of the nineteenth century as a reminiscence of the crusted veterans of a bygone age, whose talk mellowed at the second bottle, and became drivel only at the fourth. Lord Eldon relates how a reverend Silenus, a Doctor of Divinity of Oxford, was once discovered in the small hours feeling his way homewards by the delusive help of the railings encircling the Radcliffe Library, and making lay remarks as to the unwonted length of the journey.[24] Where doctors led the way, undergraduates bettered the example; and the customs of Cambridge, as well as the advice of physicians, served to ingrain in Pitt that love of port wine which helped to shorten his life.

But the Universities only reflected the customs of an age when “drunk as a lord” had become a phrase. In fashionable society it was usual to set about tippling in a methodical way. Sometimes, at the different stages of the progress, travellers’ impressions were recorded in a quaintly introspective manner. Rigby, Master of the Rolls in Ireland, when jocularly asked at dinner by the Prince of Wales to advise him about his marriage, made the witty and wise reply: “Faith, your Royal Highness, I am not drunk enough yet to give advice to a Prince of Wales about marrying.”[25] The saying recalls to mind the unofficial habit of training and selecting diplomatists and ambassadors, namely, to ply the aspirants hard and then notice who divulged fewest secrets when under the table.

Fortunately, amidst the Bacchic orgies of the time, the figure of George III stood steadfast for sobriety. His tastes and those of Queen Charlotte were simple and healthy. Further, he was deeply impressed by the miserable end of his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, whose frame, always unwieldy, became a mass of gouty corpulence and staggered on to dissolution at the age of forty-four. The Duke, so it is said, had long before warned the King, if he wished to live to a healthy old age, to avoid all the pleasures of the table.[26] The life and death of the Duke--an example more potent than words--and the homely tastes of the royal pair themselves, served to keep the bill of fare at Windsor well within the compass of that of many a small squire. After hunting for a whole morning, the King was sometimes content to lunch on a jug of barley-water. Stories to this effect endeared “farmer King George” to the plain, wholesome folk of the provinces in whom lay the strength of England; but they aroused no responsive feeling in courtiers and nobles, who looked on such lenten fare as scarcely human, certainly not regal.

The behaviour of the Prince of Wales, however, tended to bring matters back to the level beloved of the Comus rout. The orgies of Carlton House were not seldom bestial; and yet fashionable society seems to have suffered no qualms on hearing that the prince was more than once saved from suffocation by prompt removal of enswathing silks.[27] Dinners became later, longer, and more luxurious. Experienced diners were those who could reckon the banquet, not by the number of glasses, but of bottles. Instead of figuring as an incident in the course of the day, dinner became its climax. We find Horace Walpole in February 1777 complaining that it absorbed the whole of the evening: “Everything is changed; as always must happen when one grows old and is prejudiced to one’s old ways. I do not like dining at nearly six, nor beginning the evening at ten at night. If one does not conform one must live alone.”

Many letters of that amusing writer show how the latter part of the four hours was spent. Take this reference to the death of Lord Cholmondeley: “He was seventy and had a constitution to have carried him to a hundred, if he had not destroyed it by an intemperance that would have killed anybody else in half the time. As it was, he had outlived by fifteen years all his set, who have reeled into the ferry-boat so long before him.” There Horace Walpole laid his finger on one of the sores of the age. Statesmen and generals, parsons and squires, were generally worn out at fifty-five; and if by reason of strength they reached three score years and ten, those years were indeed years of sorrow and gout. In the annals of that period it would be impossible to find a single man possessed of the vigour of Mr. Gladstone at eighty, or the subtlety and firmness displayed by Beaconsfield at Berlin at the age of seventy-four. A nonagenarian was never seen at St. Stephen’s: at seventy statesmen were laid by in flannel and wheeled about in bath-chairs. The cause of it all may be summed up in one word--port wine.

This chapter would extend to an unwieldy length if a full account were given of what was, perhaps, the most characteristic vice of the age. Gambling has always flourished in an uncultured, reckless and ostentatious society. Men who have no mental resources within themselves are all too apt to seek diversion in the vagaries of chance. Tacitus noted it as the worst vice of the savage Teutons whom in other respects he lauded; and certainly none of their descendants gamed more than the Englishmen of the Georgian era. In vain did the King set his face against the evil. The murmurs grew not loud but deep when he forbade gambling at Court on that much cherished occasion, “twelfth-night.” The courtiers then substituted cards, and betted furiously on them, until they too were banished from the royal palaces, even on that merry festival.[28] But here again the Prince of Wales neutralized his father’s example, and before long succeeded in contracting debts to a princely amount, whereupon they were considerately paid by Parliament. That sturdy opponent of George III, Charles James Fox, outran even the Prince of Wales in zeal. At an all night sitting he is known to have lost £12,000; and, putting fortune to the test, lost successively £12,000 and £11,000 more. His great rival, the younger Pitt, plunged into play for a brief space, but on finding it get too strong a hold over him, resolutely freed himself from its insidious meshes. Thereafter that genial wit, George Selwyn, pointed the moral of their early careers by comparing the rivals to the industrious and idle apprentices of Hogarth.

* * * * *

The mention of Hogarth awakens a train of thought alien to his self-satisfied age. One begins to inquire what was the manner of life of those coarse thickset figures who fill the background of his realistic canvases. Were Englishmen of the lower orders really given over to Bacchic orgies alternating with long spells of flesh-restoring torpor? What was their attitude towards public affairs? While Rousseau began to open out golden vistas of a social millennium, were the toilers really so indifferent to all save the grossest facts of existence? The question is difficult to answer. The Wilkes affair seemed for the time to arouse universal interest, but the low class Londoners who bawled themselves hoarse for “Wilkes and Liberty” probably cared for that demagogue mainly because he was a Londoner bent on defying the House of Commons. Personal feelings rather than political convictions seem to have determined their conduct; for Wilkes was not reviled a few years later when he went over to the King’s side. Meanwhile the Gordon Riots had shown the London populace in another light. As for the County Reform Associations of the years 1780–4, they had very little hold upon the large towns, except in Yorkshire; and there the movement was due to the exceptionally bad representation and to the support of the great Whig landlords. The experience of those decades proves that political action which arises out of temporary causes (especially of a material kind) will lead to little result.

That mercurial and ill-educated populace seems to have shaken off its political indifference only at the time of a general election. Moritz describes the tumultuous joy with which Londoners took part in the election of the year 1782. The sight of carters and draymen eagerly listening to the candidates at the hustings; their shouts for a speech from Fox; the close interest which even the poorest seemed to feel in their country’s welfare, made a deep impression on Moritz, who found the sight far more exhilarating than that of reviews on the parade ground at Berlin. His mental comparison of Londoners with the Romans of the time of Coriolanus was, however, cut short when he saw “the rampant spirit of liberty and the wild impatience of a genuine English mob.” At the end of the proceedings the assembly tore down the hustings, smashed the benches and chairs, and carried the fragments about with them as signs of triumph.[29] Rousseau and Marat, who saw something of English life during their stay in this country, declared that Britons were free only during an election; and the former averred that the use which they made of “the brief moments of freedom renders the loss of liberty well deserved.”[30] Certainly their elections were times of wild licence; and the authorities seem to have acquiesced in the carnival as tending to promote a dull, if not penitential, obedience in the sequel. Not without reason, then, did Horace Walpole exclaim, at the close of the American War--“War is a tragedy; other politics but a farce.”

The moralist who cons the stories of the frivolity and vice of that age is apt to wonder that any progress was made in a society where war and waste seemed to be the dominant forces. Yet he should remember that it is the extravagant and exceptional which is chronicled, while the humdrum activities of life, being taken for granted, find no place either in newspapers, memoirs, or histories. We read that in the eight years of the American War the sum of £115,000,000 was added to the National Debt, the interest on which in the year 1784 amounted to £9,669,435.[31] But do we inquire how a country, which with great difficulty raised a revenue of £25,000,000 a year, could bear this load and the far heavier burdens of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars? The problem seems insoluble until we remember that British industry was then entering on its most expansive phase. The condition of our land may be compared with that of a sturdy oak which has had one of its limbs torn away and its foliage blighted by a storm. Yet, if the roots grip the soil deep down, the sap of a single season will restore the verdure, and in a few years the dome of foliage will rise as shapely and imposing as ever. So was it to be with England. Her astonishingly quick recovery may be ascribed partly to the exertions of the great man whose public life will here be set forth. But one man can do little more than direct the toil of the many to fruitful issues; and the fruitfulness that marked the first decade of his supremacy resulted from the contact of the nation’s roots with a new and fertile layer of soil.

Below the surface of the national life, with its wars and party intrigues, there lay another world, in which the thoughts of Watt and Trevithick, of Hargreaves, Arkwright and Cartwright, were slowly taking shape in actuality. There lay the England of the future. Already its strength, though but that of an embryo, sufficed to send up enough of vital sap quickly to repair the losses of war; and the first claim of the younger Pitt to the title of Statesman lay in his perception of the needs and claims of this hidden life.

The mechanical inventions which led up to the era of great production resulted indirectly from the outburst of industrial activity that followed the victorious issue of the Seven Years’ War. “Necessity is the mother of Invention”; and the great need after 1763 was to quicken the spinning of yarn so that the spinsters of a household could keep the father supplied with enough weft for his loom. This necessity quickened the wits of a Lancashire weaver, Hargreaves; and in 1764 he constructed his “jenny,” to lighten the toil of his wife. In quick succession came the inventions of Arkwright and Crompton, as already noted. The results obtained by the latter were surprising, muslin and other delicate fabrics being wrought with success in Great Britain. In a special Report issued by the East India Company in 1793, the complaint was made that every shop in England offered for sale “British muslins equal in appearance and of more elegant patterns than those of India, for one fourth, or perhaps more than one third, less price.”[32] Further improvements increased the efficiency of this machinery, which soon was used extensively in the north-west of England, and in Lanarkshire. The populations of Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, and Birmingham, after 1780, began to increase amazingly.[33] Hitherto they had numbered between 30,000 and 60,000 souls. Now they began to outstrip Bristol and Norwich, the second and third of English cities.

It is noteworthy that the Industrial Revolution in this, its first phase, brought wealth and contentment to all members of the community. The quantities of thread, varying in fineness, but severally invariable in texture and strength, enabled the hand-loom weavers to push on with their work with none of the interruptions formerly caused by the inability of hard-pressed spinsters to supply the requisite amount of yarn. These last, it is true, lost somewhat in economic independence; for by degrees they sank to the position of wage-earners in mills, but they were on the whole less hard-worked than before, water furnishing the power previously applied by the spinster’s foot; and the family retained its independence because the father and brothers continued to work up cloth on their own hand-looms and to sell the produce at the weekly markets of Manchester or Blackburn, Leeds or Halifax. In the case of the staple industry of Yorkshire, many men reared the sheep, dressed and dyed the fleeces, worked up the thread into cloth, and finally, with their sons, took it on a packhorse to the nearest cloth market. A more complete example of economic independence it would be difficult to find; and the prosperity of this class--at once farmers, and dyers, manufacturers, and cloth merchants--was enhanced by the new spinning machinery which came rapidly into use after the year 1770.

This fact is emphasized in a vivid sketch of life in a Lancashire village drawn by one who saw it at the time of these momentous developments. William Radcliffe describes the prosperity which they brought to the homes of the farmer-artisans who formed the bulk of the population of his native village of Mellor, about fourteen miles north of Manchester. He calls the years 1788 to 1803 the golden age of the cotton industry. Every out-house in the village was fitted as a loom-shop; and the earnings of each family averaged from 80 to 100 or sometimes even 120 shillings a week.[34] This account, written by a man who rose to be a large manufacturer at Stockport is probably overdrawn; but there can be no doubt that the exuberant prosperity of the North of England provided the new vital force which enabled the country speedily to rise with strength renewed at the very time when friends and enemies looked to see her fall for ever. Some idea of the magnitude of this new source of wealth may be gained from the official returns of the value of the cotton goods exported from Great Britain at the following dates:

1710 £5,698 1751 45,986 1764 200,354 1780 355,060 1785 864,710 1790 1,662,369 1795 2,433,331 1800 3,572,217 1806 9,753,824

After 1803 Cartwright’s power-loom came more and more into use, and that, too, at the time when Watt’s steam-engine became available for general use. The pace of the Industrial Revolution was thus accelerated; and in this, its third phase, the far-reaching change brought distress to the homes of the weavers, as was to be seen in the Luddite riots of 1810–11. This, however, belongs to a period later than that dealt with in these pages. Very noteworthy is the fact that in the years 1785–1806, which nearly cover the official life of Pitt, the exports of cotton goods increased almost twelvefold in value; and that the changes in the textile industries enhanced not only the wealth of the nation but also the prosperity of the working classes in districts which had been the poorest and most backward.

Limits of space preclude any reference to the revolution wrought in the iron industry when coal and coke began to take the place of wood in the smelting of that metal. It must suffice to say that, whereas the English iron industry had seemed in danger of extinction, it now made giant strides ahead. In 1777 the first iron bridge was erected at Coalbrookdale, over the Severn. Six years later Cort of Gosport obtained a patent for converting pig-iron into malleable-iron by a new and expeditious process;[35] and in 1790 the use of steam-engines at the blast furnaces trebled their efficiency. This and the former reference to the steam-engine will suffice to remind the reader of the enormous developments opened up in all manufactures when the skill and patience of Watt transformed a scientific toy into the most important generator of power hitherto used by man.

Thus, in the closing years of the eighteenth century--that much despised century, which really produced nearly all the great inventions that the over-praised nineteenth century was merely to develop--the Industrial Revolution entered on its second phase. The magnets which thenceforth irresistibly attracted industry, and therefore population, were coal and iron. Accordingly, as Great Britain had abundance of these minerals in close proximity, she was able in a very short space of time to become the workshop of the world. The Eldorado dreamt of by the followers of Columbus was at last found in the Midlands and moorlands of the north of England. For the present, the discovery brought no curse with it. While multiplying man’s powers, it also stimulated his ingenuity in countless ways. Far from diverting his energies from work to what is, after all, only the token of work, it concentrated his thoughts upon productive activity, and thus helped not only to make work but to make man.

While the moors and vales of the North awakened to new and strange activities, the agricultural districts of the Midlands and South also advanced in wealth and population. A scientific rotation of crops, deep ploughing, and thorough manuring of the soil altered the conditions of life. Here again England led the way. Arthur Young, in his “Travels in France” (1787–9) never tires of praising the intelligence and energy of our great landowners, whereas in France his constant desire is to make the seigneurs “skip.” In the main, no doubt, the verdict of Young was just. Landlords in England were the leaders of agricultural reform. In France they were clogs on progress. Yet, the changes here were not all for good. That is impossible. The semi-communal and almost torpid life of the village was unequal to the claims of the new age; and, amidst much of discomfort and injustice to the poor, individual tenures, enclosures, and high-farming became the order of the day.[36] New facilities for travel, especially in the form of mail-coaches, better newspapers (a result of the Wilkes affair)--these and other developments of the years 1770–84 heralded the dawn of an age which was to be more earnest, more enlightened, less restful, and far more complex. The times evidently called for a man who, while holding to all that was best in the old life, fully recognized the claims of the coming era. Such a man was William Pitt.

In many respects he summed up in his person the tendencies of the closing decades of the century, just as the supreme figure of his father reflected all that was most brilliant and chivalrous in the middle of the Georgian era. If the elder Pitt raised England to heights of splendour never reached before, the younger helped to retrieve the disasters brought on by those who blindly disregarded the warnings of his father. In the personality both of father and of son there was a stateliness that overawed ordinary mortals, but the younger man certainly came more closely into touch with the progressive tendencies of the age. A student of Adam Smith, he set himself to foster the industrial energies of the land. In order to further the cause of peace, he sought the friendship of the French nation, of which Chatham was the inveterate enemy; and in the brightest years of his career he seemed about to inaugurate the golden age foretold by the Illuminati. As by contact with Adam Smith he marched at the head of the new and peaceful commercialism, so too through his friendship with Wilberforce he felt the throb of the philanthropic movements of his times.

For the new stirrings of life in the spheres of religion, art, and literature, Pitt felt no deep concern. Like his father, and like that great genius of the South who wrecked his career, he was “a political being.” In truth, the circumstances of the time compelled him to concentrate all his energies on public affairs. It was his lot to steer the ship of state through twenty of the most critical years of its chequered voyage. Taking the tiller at a time of distress, he guided the bark into calmer waters; and if he himself did not live on to weather a storm more prolonged and awful than that from which he at first saved his people, yet even in the vortex of the Napoleonic cyclone he was to show the dauntless bearing, the firm faith in the cause of ordered freedom, the unshaken belief in the destinies of his race, which became the son of Chatham and the typical Englishman of the age.

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I. EARLY YEARS

I am glad that I am not the eldest son, but that I can serve my country in the House of Commons like papa.--PITT, May 1766.

Champions of the customs of primogeniture must have been disquieted by observing how frequently the mental endowments of the parents were withheld from their eldest son and showered upon his younger brother. The first Earl of Chatham was a second son, and found his doughtiest opponent in Henry Fox, Lord Holland, also a second son. By a singular coincidence the extraordinary talents of their second sons carried them in their turn to the head of their respective parties and engaged them in the longest duel which the annals of Parliament record. And when the ascendancy of William Pitt the Younger appeared to be unshakably established, it was shattered by the genius of the second surviving son of Charles Marie de Buonaparte.

The future defender of Great Britain was born on 28th May 1759, just ten years before the great Corsican. His ancestry, no less than the time of his birth, seemed to be propitious. The son of the Earl of Chatham, he saw the light in the year when the brilliant victories of Rodney, Boscawen, Hawke, and Wolfe lessened the French navy by sixty-four sail of the line, and secured Canada for Britain. The almost doting fondness which the father felt for the second son, “the hope and comfort of my life,” may perhaps have been the outcome of the mental ecstasy of those glorious months.

If William Pitt was fortunate in the time of his birth, he was still more so in the character of his father. In the nature of “the Great Commoner,” the strain of pride and vanity was commingled with feelings of burning patriotism, and with a fixed determination to use all honourable means for the exaltation of his country. Never since the age of Elizabeth had Englishmen seen a man of personality so forceful, of self-confidence so indomitable, of patriotism so pure and intense. The effect produced by his hawk-like eye, his inspiring mien and oratory was heightened by the consciousness that here at last was an honest statesman. In an age when that great party manipulator, Walpole, had reduced politics to a game of give and take, the scrupulous probity of Chatham (who refused to touch a penny of the interest on the balance at the War Ministry which all his predecessors had appropriated) shone with redoubled lustre. His powers were such as to dazzle his contemporaries. The wide sweep of his aims in 1756–61, his superb confidence as to their realization, the power of his oratory, his magnetic influence, which made brave officers feel the braver after an interview with him--all this enabled him completely to dominate his contemporaries.

In truth his personality was so dazzling as to elude the art of portraiture. At ordinary times he might have been little more than a replica of that statesman of the reign of Charles II whom Dryden has immortalized:

A man so various that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind’s epitome.

But Chatham was fortunate in his times. He certainly owed very much to the elevating force of a great idea. In the early part of his life, when no uplifting influence was at work, his actions were often grossly incongruous and at times petty and factious. Not until he felt the inspiration of the idea of Empire did his genius wing its way aloft. If it be true that the Great Commoner made the British Empire, it is also true that the Empire made him what he was, the inspirer of heroic deeds, the invigorator of his people.

In comparison with these qualities, which entitle him to figure in English annals as Aristotle’s “magnificent man,” his defects were venial. Nevertheless, as some of them lived on in a lesser degree in his son, we must remember his arrogance, his melodramatic airs, his over-weening self-will, and his strange inconsistencies. In no one else would these vices and defects have been tolerated; that they were overlooked in him is the highest tribute that can be paid to the splendour of his services and the sterling worth of his nature.

If we look further back into the antecedents of the Pitt family, we find it domiciled at or near Blandford in Dorset, where it had produced one poet of quite average abilities, Christopher Pitt (1699–1748), whose translation of Virgil had many admirers. The love of adventure and romance, so often found in West Country families, had already been seen in Thomas Pitt (1653–1726), who worked his way to the front in India despite the regulations of the Company, became Governor of Madras, and made his fortune by very questionable transactions.[37] His great stroke of good fortune was the purchase of the famous diamond, which he thereafter sold to the Regent of France for nearly six times the price of purchase. He married a lady who traced her descent to a natural son of James V of Scotland; and to this union of a daring adventurer with the scion of a chivalrous race we may perhaps refer the will-power and the mental endowments which shone so brightly in their grandson, the first Earl of Chatham.

On his mother’s side the younger Pitt could claim a distinguished descent. Her maiden name was Hester Grenville, and she was the daughter of Richard Grenville and Hester, Countess Temple. The appended table will show the relation of the Pitt and Grenville families:

RICHARD GRENVILLE m. HESTER (Countess Temple). | +-----------------------+------+--------------+ | | | RICHARD GRENVILLE GEORGE GRENVILLE HESTER GRENVILLE (created (Earl Temple), (1712–70) (m. Baroness Chatham in 1761) m. (1711–79). Elizabeth Wyndham). William Pitt (created Earl | of Chatham in 1766). +--------------------+----------+ | | | | GEORGE GRENVILLE (2nd WILLIAM WYNDHAM | EARL TEMPLE, AND MARQUIS GRENVILLE (Lord | of Buckingham), d. 1813. Grenville), Foreign | Minister in 1791–1801, | and 1806–7. | | +-------------------+-----------+------------+---------+----+ | | | | | HESTER (1755–80) JOHN (2nd HARRIET WILLIAM PITT JAMES CHARLES m. Lord Mahon Earl of (1758–86) (the younger) (1761–79). (3rd Earl Chatham) m. Mr. E. (1759–1806). Stanhope). (1756–1835). Eliot. | +----+ | LADY HESTER STANHOPE, etc.

The personality of Lady Chatham, if less remarkable, is more lovable than that of her husband. In contrast to his theatrical, lordly, and imperious ways, she shone by her simplicity and sweetness. His junior by many years, she accepted his devotion with something of awe, and probably felt his oft recurring attacks of gout, for which he magniloquently apologized, to be a link between them; for the Jove of the Senate became docile and human when he was racked with pain.[38] Her tender care at these times, and at others her tactful acquiescence in his moods and plans, ensured tranquillity and happiness in their household. Not that she lacked firmness of character, when occasion required; but we may ascribe her pliability to the personal ascendancy of her lord, to the customs of the times, and to her perception of the requisites for a peaceful existence. She carried her complaisance so far as to leave to her consort the choice of the residence at Hayes, near Bromley, in Kent, which he bought at the end of the year 1754. The following are the almost Griselda-like terms in which she defers to his opinion on the matter: “For the grand affair proposed by my dear love, I have only to reply that I wish him to follow what he judges best, for he can best judge what sort of economy suits with the different plans which he may choose to make hereafter. Whatever you decide upon will be secure of being approved by me.”[39]

When a woman renounces all claim to a voice in the selection of her abode, we may be sure that she will neither interfere much in her husband’s political career, nor seek to shine in a salon of blue-stockings. In fact, Lady Chatham’s influence on her children was purely domestic. Her realm was the home. There is scarcely a trace of any intellectual impress consciously exerted upon her gifted son, William; but her loving care ensured his survival from the many illnesses of his early years; and she dowered him with the gentler traits for which we search in vain in the coldly glittering personality of Chatham. As examples of her loving care for her children, I may cite the following passages from her letters. In August 1794, when she felt old age coming on apace, she wrote in this tender strain:

I feel that I cannot support the idea of leaving you, my beloved sons, without saying unto ye how truly my fond affection has increasingly ever attended ye both, and that my constant prayers have been daily addresst to the Omnipotent Disposer of all events, that you might be directed in all things by the blessing of heavenly wisdom....

Or take this gentle chiding to William (25th April 1796):

I do not [hear] from you, my dear son, but I hear often of you in a way that makes up to me in the best manner possible for your silence. I cannot, however, help wishing that my pleasure was increased by receiving now and then a few words from you, and immediately comes almost a reflection that obliges me to unwish it again, that I may not take up any part of the small leisure you have to enjoy a little relaxation from your various calls.

The old lady long retained her vigour; for in the autumn of 1795 she describes herself as “stout enough both in body and mind to wish the wind to shift to the east so that the fleet might not be detained.”[40] Indeed, in the even strength of her body, as in the constancy of her mind, she far excelled her husband. We find Wilberforce, in the summer of 1791, entering the following note in his diary: “Old Lady Chatham, a noble antiquity--Lady Chatham asked about Fox’s speaking--is much interested about politics--seventy-five years old, and a very active mind.”[41]

Doubtless, her pride in the triumphs of her second son explains the singular buoyancy of her nature almost up to the time of her death. She must have recognized him as pre-eminently her child. In appearance he certainly favoured her. A comparison of the two noble Gainsboroughs of mother and son preserved at Orwell Park shows William to have been more a Grenville than a Pitt. His nose--that feature on which caricaturists eagerly fastened, and on which he was said proudly to suspend the House of Commons--had nothing in common with Chatham’s aquiline and terrifying prow. So, too, the whole bearing of the son was less fiery and less formidable than that of the father. In Chatham there lay the potentialities of a great warrior; but in the son’s nature these powers were wholly subordinate to the faculties that make for supremacy in civil affairs, namely, patience, reasonableness, and aptitude for logic and finance. Above all, there shone in the younger Pitt a harmony of the faculties, in which the father was lacking.

There is ample proof of the devotion with which Pitt regarded his parents. His letters to them were long and loving; but while he addressed Chatham in the stilted terms which the Earl himself affected, he wrote to his mother in a simple and direct style that tells of complete sympathy. In one of his youthful letters to her he apologized humbly for some little act of inattention; and in later years the busy Prime Minister often begged her forgiveness for his long silence. In all 363 letters to his mother have survived, and prove the tenderness of his love. Clearly also he valued her advice; for at the crisis of the early part of 1783 he asked her opinion whether or no he should take office as Prime Minister.[42] For the most part the letters contain little more than references to private affairs, which prove the warmth of his family feelings; but sometimes, especially in the later years when the overworked Prime Minister could rarely visit his mother at her home, Burton Pynsent in Somerset, he gives reasons for hoping that the progress of measures through Parliament, or the state of the negotiations with France during the Revolutionary war, would permit him to pay her a visit. The letters bear touching witness to the hopefulness of spirit which buoyed him up; but sometimes they are overclouded by disappointments in the political sphere, which were all the keener because they held him to his post and prevented the longed-for stay at Burton Pynsent in August or at Christmas. In such cases Lady Chatham’s replies are restrained and dignified. I shall sometimes draw on this correspondence, especially where it reveals Pitt’s hopes for the work of the session or the conclusion of peace.

Ingenious pleaders from the time of Macaulay onwards have shown their skill in comparing the achievements of father and son. The futility of all such tight-rope performances must be obvious to those who remember the world-wide difference between the cataclysmic forces and novel problems of the revolutionary era and the comparatively simple tasks of the age of Chatham. We shall have cause, later on, to insist on the difference in efficiency between Frederick the Great and Frederick William II as an ally; and not even the most fervent panegyrists of Chatham will dare to assert that the ill-led and underfed armies of Louis XV were foes as redoubtable as the enthusiastic hosts called into being and marshalled by the French Revolution and Napoleon.

Nevertheless, there is one of these fallacious comparisons which deserves a brief notice. Lady Chatham, on being asked by one of her grandchildren which was the cleverer, the Earl of Chatham or Mr. Pitt, replied: “Your grandpapa without doubt.”[43] The answer is remarkable. No woman in modern times has been blessed with such prodigality of power and talent both in husband and son; and we, with a knowledge of the inner forces of the two periods which she could not possess, may perhaps be inclined to ascribe her verdict to the triumph of the early memories of the wife even over the promptings of maternal pride. Explain it as we may, her judgement is certainly a signal instance of self-effacement; for the gifts of tact, prudence, and consistency whereby Pitt restored England to her rightful place in the years 1783–93 were precisely those which he derived from her.

It has often been remarked that great men have owed more to the mother’s nature than to that of the father; and, while Chatham dowered his second son with the qualities that make for versatility, display, and domination, his mother certainly imparted to him forethought, steadiness of purpose, and the gentler gifts that endeared him to a select circle of friends. Here again, one might suggest a parallel between Pitt and his great opponent, Napoleon, who owed to his father characteristics not unlike those named above, but received from his mother the steel-like powers of mind and body which made him so terrible an opponent.

* * * * *

Enough has been said to indicate some of the influences of heredity which helped to shape the career of Pitt. It is a topic on which only sciolists would venture to dogmatize. Even in his early youth William began to outshine his elder brother. In their boyhood, mostly spent at Hayes, the difference of temperament between John and William made itself felt to the disadvantage of the former. He was reserved, not to say heavy and indolent, where William was bright and attractive. “Eager” is the epithet applied to him by Lady Chatham in 1766. The eldest son, having none of the intellectual gifts and graces of Chatham, could not satisfy the imperious cravings of the father, with the result that William received an undue share of admiration. He was “the wonderful boy.” John was designed for the army, with results no less unfortunate for England than a similar choice proved ultimately to be for France in the case of Joseph Bonaparte. Well would it have been for the United Kingdom had John Pitt allowed the glorious name of Chatham to sink to comfortable mediocrity on the paternal estates of Hayes or Burton Pynsent, and never to be associated with the Isle of Walcheren. His colleagues in the Cabinet learnt to respect his judgement as that of a safe man; but, as the sequel will show, he was utterly lacking in energy and the power of inspiring others.

William, having alertness of mind and brightness of speech, was designed for Parliament. Or rather, this was his choice at the age of seven. In May 1766, on hearing that his father was raised to the Peerage, he told his tutor, the Rev. Edward Wilson, in all seriousness, that he was glad he was not the eldest son, but that he could serve his country in the House of Commons like his papa.[44] The words have often been misquoted, even by Earl Stanhope, the boy being reported as saying, “I want to speak in the House of Commons like papa.” The words, when correctly cited, are remarkable, not for childish conceit, but for a grave and premature sense of responsibility. They show the strength of that patriotic instinct which inspired every action of his career, spurring him on to his early studies, and to the complex and crushing duties of his youth and manhood. They sound the keynote of his character and enable us to form some notion of the strength of that life-long desire to serve his native land. This, his first recorded utterance, links itself in noble unison with that last tragic gasp of 23rd January 1806--“My country. How I leave my country!”

* * * * *

The health of the little William was so precarious that he and his brothers and sisters spent much time at the seaside resorts, Weymouth and Lyme Regis, which were not far from Burton Pynsent, an estate bequeathed by an admirer to the Earl of Chatham. Yet notwithstanding all the care bestowed on him, the boy had but a frail hold on life. Illness beset him during fully the half of his youth. At the age of fourteen he was still short and thin and weighed only six stone, two pounds.[45] Observers, however, agree that his spirits always rose superior to weakness; and to this characteristic, as also to his indomitable will, we may attribute his struggling on through an exhausting career to the age of forty-seven. The life of Pitt is a signal proof of the victory which mind can, for a time, win over matter.

Very naturally, his parents decided to have him trained at home rather than at a public school. Chatham, while at Eton, formed the most unfavourable impression of the public school system and summed it up in his remark to Shelburne that he had “scarce observed a boy who was not cowed for life at Eton; that a public school might suit a boy of a turbulent, forward disposition, but would not do where there was any gentleness.”[46]

The tutor chosen for this purpose was the Rev. Edward Wilson, of Pembroke Hall (now College), Cambridge, who had charge of him from his sixth to his fourteenth year. The mutual affection of tutor and pupil is seen in a letter which the tutor wrote at Weymouth in September 1766, describing William as often standing by him while he read, and making remarks that frequently lit up the subject and impressed it on the memory. His ardour, he adds, could not be checked.[47] Wilson’s training seems to have been highly efficient, as will appear when we come to consider the phenomenal attainments of his pupil at the time of his admission to the University of Cambridge.

It is perhaps significant that that later prodigy of learning and oratorical power, Macaulay, was also not brought into contact with our public school system. Both of these remarkable men may have owed some of their originality to the thoroughness of the private tuition which they received before entering the university. Had they passed through the mill of a public school they would certainly have been less angular, and would have gained in knowledge of men. Pitt especially might have cast off that reserve and stiffness which often cost him so dear. But both of them would assuredly have lost in individuality what they might have gained in bonhomie. Still more certain is it that those hotbeds of slang would have unfitted them for the free expression of their thoughts in dignified and classical English. The ease with which, from the time of his first entrance into Parliament, Pitt wielded the manifold resources of his mother tongue may be ascribed partly to hereditary genius but also to daily converse with one of the greatest of orators. It was Chatham’s habit to read with his favourite son passages from the Bible or from some other great classic. We also know from one of the Earl’s private memoranda that he made it a special study to clothe his thoughts in well-chosen words.[48] Indeed, he never talked but always conversed. We may be sure, then, that even the lighter efforts of the statesman must have been to the boy at once an inspiration to great deeds, a melodious delight, and a lesson in rhetoric. What youth possessed of genius would not have had his faculties braced by learning English from such a tongue, by viewing mankind through such a lens?

This education at home probably explains one of Pitt’s marked characteristics, namely, his intense hopefulness. Brought up on the best authors, imbued with the highest principles, and lacking all knowledge of the seamy side of life, he cherished an invincible belief in the triumph of those aims which he felt to be good and true. This is an invaluable faculty; but it needs to be checked by acquaintance with the conduct of the average man; and that experience Pitt scarcely ever gained except by hearsay. Sir George Trevelyan has remarked that the comparative seclusion of Macaulay in youth led to his habitual over-estimate of the knowledge usually possessed by men. Certainly it led to the creation of that singular figment, “Macaulay’s school-boy.” A similar remark probably holds true of the quality of Pitt’s nature noted above. Partly, no doubt, his hopefulness was the heritage bequeathed by Chatham; but it was strengthened by Pitt’s bookish outlook on life.

The surroundings of his childhood and early youth must also have favoured the growth of that patrician virtue, confidence. Up to the year 1774 he lived on his father’s estates at Hayes and Burton Pynsent, amidst some of the choicest scenery in the south of England. The land overflowed with prosperity, which was rightly ascribed in large measure to the genius of Chatham. Until the shadow of the American War of Independence fell on the youth, in his seventeenth year, he was the favourite son of a father whom all men revered; and his lot was cast in a land which seemed to be especially favoured. Thus pride of family and pride of race must have helped to stiffen the mental fibre of a youth on whom nature and art alike showered the gifts and graces of a chivalrous order. In a coarse nature the result would have been snobbishness. In William Pitt the outcome was devotion to the ideals of his father and buoyant confidence as to their ultimate triumph.

In some respects there is truth in the statement of Windham that Pitt never was young. Certainly for so delicate a plant the forcing process was perilously early and prolonged. In the Pitt Papers (No. XI) I have found a curious proof of the hold which the boy had over Latin at a very early age. It is a letter written to his father, the general correctness of which contrasts strangely with its large round letters enclosed within lines. It is not dated, but probably belongs to 1766, that is, to the seventh year of his age.

MI CHARISSIME PATER,

Gaudeo audire te rursum bene valere. Vidimus primates Mohecaunnuck et Wappinger, Tribuum Indicorum a septentrioli America, qui veniunt in Angliam supplicare regem ob quosdam agros. Gulielmus Johnson, eques auratus, desiderabat auxilium eorum in bello, et illi omnes abierunt ut pugnarent contra Gallos; sed, cum domum rediebant, sentiebant Batavos arripuisse omnes suos agros. Vulgus apud Portland illos parum commode tractabat.

Sum, mi charissime Pater, tibi devinctissimus, GULIELMUS PITT.

I have also found a curious proof of the stilted style in which the boy wrote to his father, while on the very same day he wrote to his brother almost in the terms which a boy of eleven would use. To the Earl of Chatham he thus begins a letter of 31st July 1770:

From the weather we have had here I flatter myself that the sun shone on your expedition, and that the views were enough enlivened thereby to prevent the drowsy Morpheus from taking the opportunity of the heat to diffuse his poppies upon the eyes of the travellers.[49]

This almost rises to the pomposity of style with which Chatham described to his son William the stinging of carriage-horses by wasps. The insects figure as “an ambuscade of Pandours,” and the horses as “these coursers of spirit not inferior to Xanthus and Podarges.”[50]

* * * * *

Here on the other hand is the boy’s letter to his brother:

Hayes, July 31 1770.

DEAR BROTHER,

I assure you that I am obliged to you beyond what is to be expressed for your epistle or journal. The dialogue between you and your host is very entertaining to those not interested in the want of provision in the inn. But I fancy it was not so to you, as it afforded little or no hope of dinner unless you could dine on the small tithes. The 2 Masons are incomparable. I think the intended candidate is to the full as likely as G. O. to succeed, and for what I know deserves it better. As I have seen neither the statue at Guilford nor that at South Carolina, I cannot judge which excels in point of workmanship, but I know which of the two noble Persons (in my opinion) is the superior. Your white mare I take to be more of the species of an elephant than any other; and can carry houses or castles on her back. Tho’, great as She is, Long Sutton might perhaps keep her under her feet. These two mornings I have rode out before breakfast. Your Greek was excellent, and (I think) with practice you may become a Thucydides. Dapple is in good health; and we have taken the liberty to desire him to honour us with following the little chaise. I hope all stock is pure well.

I am, dear brother, Affectionately yours, WILLIAM PITT.[51]

The contrast between the two letters proves that Chatham’s influence must have overwrought the boy’s brain and inflated his style. The letter to John evinces a joy in life natural to a boy of eleven, together with a wide range of interests and accomplishments.

That the writers of the period also did much to form the boy’s style will appear from his first poem, “On the Genius of Poetry,” which bears date May 1771.[52] It seems to be the joint product of Harriet and William Pitt:

Ye sacred Imps of thund’ring Jove descend, Immortal Nine, to me propitious, bend Inclining downward from Parnassus’ brow; To me, young Bard, some Heav’nly fire allow. From Aganippe’s murmur strait repair, Assist my labours and attend my pray’r. Inspire my verse. Of Poetry it sings. Thro’ Her, the deeds of Heroes and of Kings Renown’d in arms, with fame immortal stand. By Her no less, are spread thro’ ev’ry land Those patriot names, who in their country’s cause Triumphant fall, for Liberty and Laws. Exalted high, the Spartan Hero stands, Encircled with his far-renowned bands. Whoe’er devoted for their country die, Thro’ Her their fame ascends the starry sky. She too perpetuates each horrid deed; When laws are trampled, when their guardians bleed, That shall the Muse to infamy prolong Example dread, and theme of tragic song. Nor less immortal, than the Chiefs, resound The Poets’ names, who spread their deeds around. Homer shall flourish first in rolls of fame; And still shall leave the Roman Virgil’s name; With living bays is lofty Pindar crown’d; In distant ages Horace stands renown’d. These Bards, and more, fair Greece and Rome may boast, And some may flourish on this British Coast. Witness the man, on whom the Muse did smile, Who sung our Parents’ fall and Satan’s guile, A second Homer, favor’d by the Nine. Sweet Spenser, Jonson, Shakspear the divine. And He, fair Virtue’s Bard, who rapt doth sing The praise of Freedom and Laconia’s King. But high o’er Chiefs and Bards supremely great Shall Publius shine, the Guardian of our state. Him shall th’ immortal Nine themselves record, With deathless fame his gen’rous toil reward, Shall tune the harp to loftier sounding lays And thro’ the world shall spread his ceaseless praise. Their hands alone can match the Heav’nly strain And with due fire his wond’rous glories sing.

The poem, which is in William’s handwriting, shows that by the age of twelve he had acquired the trick--it was no more--of writing in the style of Pope and Johnson. The lines remind us of the felicitous phrase in which Cowper characterized the output of that school:

The click-clock tintinnabulum of rhyme.

But they show neatness of thought and phrase. In a word, they are good Johnsonese.

The same quality of sonorous ponderosity is observable in Pitt’s letters of 3rd June 1771 to his uncle the statesman, Earl Temple, thanking him for a present, in which the names of Lyttelton and Coke are invoked. In the following sentences the trend of the boy’s thoughts is very marked: “I revere this gift the more, as I have heard Lyttelton and Coke were props of the Constitution, which is a synonimous [sic] term for just Liberty.” The “marvellous boy” ends by quoting part of a line of Virgil, which still more powerfully inspired him:

avunculus excitat Hector.

The next year saw the production of a play, which he and his brothers and sisters acted at Burton Pynsent on 30th May 1772. Here again the motive is solely political: a King, Laurentius, on his way homeward, after a successful war, suffers shipwreck, and is mourned as dead. The news leads an ambitious counsellor, Gordinus, to plot the overthrow of the regency of the Queen; but his advances are repelled by a faithful minister, Pompilius--the character played by William Pitt--in the following lines:

Our honoured Master’s steps may guide her on, Whose inmost soul she knew; and surely she Is fitted most to fill her husband’s throne, She, whom maternal tenderness inspires, Will watch incessant o’er her lovely son And best pursue her dear Laurentius’ plans.

Pompilius warns the Queen of the plot of Gordinus, and persuades her to entrust her son Florus to his care in a sylvan retreat. Thither also Laurentius comes in disguise; for, after landing as a forlorn survivor, he hears of dangerous novelties that had poisoned men’s minds and seduced the army from allegiance to the Queen. Pompilius, while visiting the royal heir, sees and recognizes Laurentius, brings him to Florus, and prepares to overthrow the traitors. In due course the King’s adherents defeat the forces of Gordinus, who is slain by Laurentius himself, while Pompilius, his standard bearer, kills another arch-conspirator. The King grants a general pardon in these lines:

Us it behoves, to whom by gracious Heav’n The cares of nations and of States are giv’n-- Us it behoves with clemency to sway That glorious sceptre which the gods bestow. We are the shepherds sent to tend the flock, Sent to protect from wrong, not to destroy. Oh! Florus! When thou govern’st our domains, Bear these thy father’s precepts in thy mind. Thro’ love control thy subjects, not thro’ fear. The people’s love the bulwark of thy throne. Give not thy mind to passion or revenge, But let fair Mercy ever sway thy soul.[53]

It is fairly certain that none of the children but William could have written these lines; and the fact that the mainspring of the action is political further stamps the play as his own. Some Spirit of the Future seems to have hovered over him, for the mental derangement of George III in 1788 brought to the front questions relating to a Regency not very unlike those sketched by the boy playwright. The sense of loyalty and devotion which informs the play was then also to guide Pitt’s footsteps through a bewildering maze. Indeed this effusion seems almost like a marionette’s version of the Regency affair: Laurentius is a more romantic George III, Pompilius quite startlingly foreshadows Pitt the Prime Minister, the Prince of Wales (an undutiful Florus) and Fox may pass for the conspirators; and the motif of the play twangs a mimic prelude to the intrigues of Carlton House. In the acting of the play the elder brother seems far to have surpassed William, who bore himself stiffly and awkwardly. Such was the testimony of young Addington, a lifelong friend, who saw the play acted on another occasion at Hayes.[54] The criticism is valuable as showing how ingrained in Pitt’s nature was the shyness and gaucherie in public which were ever to hamper his progress.

Juvenile authorship has its dangers for a delicate child; and we are not surprised to find from notes left by his first tutor to Bishop Tomline that the half of Pitt’s boyhood was beset by illnesses which precluded all attempt at study. But nothing stopped the growth of his mental powers, which Wilson summed up in the Platonic phrase, “Pitt seemed never to learn but merely to recollect.” At the age of fourteen and a half, then, he was ripe for Cambridge. It is true that youths then entered the English Universities at an age fully as early as the Scottish lads who went from the parish school, or manse, straight to Edinburgh or Aberdeen. Charles James Fox, Gibbon, and the lad who became Lord Eldon, entered Oxford at fifteen. Wilberforce, who at seventeen went up from Hull to St. John’s College, Cambridge, was probably the senior of most of the freshmen of his year; but the case of Pitt was even then exceptional.

Cambridge on the whole enjoyed a better reputation than Oxford for steady work; but this alone does not seem to have turned the thoughts of the Earl of Chatham so far eastwards. He himself was an Oxford man, and the distance of Cambridge from Burton Pynsent, the usual abode of the family, would naturally have told in favour of Oxford.

The determining facts seem to have been that Wilson’s companionship was deemed essential, and that he, as a graduate of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, turned the scale in favour of his own college. This appears from Wilson’s letter of 2nd December 1772 to his wife:

I could not have acted with more prudence than I have done in the affair of Pembroke Hall. Mr. Pitt is not the child his years bespeak him to be. He has now all the understanding of a man, and is, and will be, my steady friend thro’ life.... He will go to Pembroke, not a weak boy to be made a property of, but to be admir’d as a prodigy; not to hear lectures but to spread light. His parts are most astonishing and universal. He will be fully qualified for a wrangler before he goes, and be an accomplished classick, mathematician, historian and poet.[55]

How often have similar prophecies led to disappointment. In the case of the “wonderful boy,” they did but point the way to a career whose meridian splendour has eclipsed the tender beauty of its dawn.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

II. AT CAMBRIDGE

A man that is young in yeares may be old in houres, if he have lost no time. But that happeneth rarely.--BACON.

On 26th April 1773 Pitt’s name was entered at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge; and he commenced residence there on 8th October 1772. His health being ever a matter of grave concern, Wilson stayed with him in order to prevent any boyish imprudences and accompany him in riding. But all precautions were in vain. Despite the invigorating influences of sea-air at Lyme Regis, where William and his brother had stayed from June up to 21st September, he soon fell ill at Cambridge, and remained in bed for several weeks. Thanks to the medical skill of Drs. Addington and Glynn (the former an old friend of Chatham), he gradually got the better of the hereditary foe, gout; but the letters which passed between Lady Chatham and Wilson attest the severity of the seizure. The boy seems to have won the love of his medical attendants, as appears from this sentence in her letter of 22nd November. “What a gift William has to conciliate the love of those who are once acquainted with him.”

There is a story told to Thomas Moore by the Bishop of Bath and Wells, that Pitt brought his nurse with him in the carriage to Cambridge, and that she stayed to look after him. This strange assertion is made in the poet’s diary for 13th February 1826; and the distrust which that late date inspires is increased when we find that the Bishop had the anecdote from Paley, who “was very near being his [Pitt’s] tutor, instead of Pretyman, but Paley did not like it.”[56] As Paley was at Christ’s, and there never was any question of Pitt entering at that college or receiving from the outset regular instruction outside the walls of Pembroke, the story lacks every element of credibility.

The facts are as follows: Mrs. Sparry, who was attendant or housekeeper at Burton Pynsent, went to Cambridge to nurse the boy through his long and serious illness, and finally brought him home. At last the invalid was strong enough to bear the journey. Four days were taken up in reaching London; and we find him writing thence to his mother on 6th December that he had not been fatigued and felt strong enough to walk all the way home; but, he added, Mrs. Sparry urged him not to write much.[57] He did not return to Cambridge (“the evacuated seat of the Muses” as Chatham styled it) until 13th July 1774. Then he informed Lady Chatham that Cambridge was empty, that Dr. Glynn had called on him and had inquired after Mrs. Sparry, who would be glad to hear that the bed at his rooms had been well aired. These trifles enable us to reduce the oft quoted nurse story to its proper insignificance.

Wilson seems to have done his best to amuse his charge in the dreary vacation time of July–September 1774; for on 24th August Pitt described to his mother a ride in which Wilson and he had lost their way among lanes and fields and regained the track with some damage to hedges, and after a chase of one of the steeds, but far too late to share in college dinner. Again, on 1st September, he wrote to the Earl of Chatham: “The ardour for celebrating this day is as great at Cambridge as anywhere; and Mr. Wilson himself, catching a spark of it, signalized himself by killing a crow on the wing after a walk of six hours.”[58]

The natural vivacity of disposition, which charmed all his friends, must have played no small part in the recovery of his health. The medical authorities of to-day would also probably assign more importance to regular hours, exercise, and careful diet than to the use of port wine, adopted in compliance with his physicians’ recommendation, on which some contemporary writers dwell with much gusto. Certain it is that from the year 1774 onwards “his health became progressively confirmed.”

This phrase occurs in the biography of Pitt written by his college tutor, Dr. Pretyman, whose style it aptly characterizes. The book is indeed one of the most ponderous ever published. As tutor, friend, and adviser, the Rev. Dr. Pretyman had unique opportunities for giving to the world a complete and life-like portrait. Pitt was entrusted to his care and to that of his colleague, Dr. Turner, in 1773–4, and thereafter to Pretyman alone. The undergraduate soon conceived for him an affection which was strong and lasting. Their intercourse suffered little interruption, not even from the ecclesiastical honours which the young Prime Minister so freely bestowed on his old tutor. The bishop, who in 1803 took the name of Tomline, continued to be the friend and adviser of the Statesman up to the dreary days which succeeded the death-blow of Austerlitz. Pitt died in his arms, and he was his literary executor. Yet, despite the mass of materials put into his hands (or was it because of their mass?)[59] he wrote one of the dullest biographies in the English language.

The solution of the riddle may perhaps be found in the cast of his mind, which was that of a mathematician and divine, while it lacked the gifts of interest in men and affairs, of insight into character, of delicate and instinctive sympathy, and of historic imagination, which enliven, reveal, interpret, and illuminate personalities and situations. Talleyrand, with a flash of almost diabolical wit, once described language as a means of concealing thought. Tomline, with laboured conscientiousness, seems to have looked on biography as a means of concealing character. Certainly he portrayed only those features which are easily discernible in the tomes of the Parliamentary History. An almost finnikin scrupulousness clogged him in the exercise of the scanty powers of portraiture with which Nature had endowed him. The biographer was continually being reined in by the literary executor, the result being a progress, which, while meant to be stately, succeeds only in being shambling. Here and there we catch glimpses of Pitt under the senatorial robes with which his friend adorned and concealed him, but they are tantalizingly brief. The Bishop was beset by so many qualms concerning the propriety of mentioning this or that incident as to “suppress many circumstances and anecdotes of a more private nature,” and to postpone the compilation of a volume on this more frivolous subject. Death supervened while the Bishop was still revolving the question of the proprieties; and we shall therefore never fully know Pitt as he appeared to his life-long counsellor.[60]

There must have been sterling qualities in the man whom the statesman thus signally honoured. Dr. Pretyman’s learning was vast. Senior Wrangler and Fellow of his College, he also became a Fellow of the Royal Society; and his attainments in the classics enabled him to command the respect of his pupil in a sphere where, according to Wilson, Pitt had the Platonic gift, not of learning, but of instinctive remembrance (ἀνάμνησις). Nevertheless, nearly all contemporaries seem to have found in the tutor and Bishop a primness and austerity which were far from attractive. Perhaps he lacked the vitality which might have energized that mass of learning. Or else the consciousness that he was a Senior Wrangler, together with the added load of tutorial and episcopal responsibility, may have been too much for him. To Pitt, nurtured amidst the magniloquence of Hayes and Burton Pynsent, the seriousness and pedantry of Pretyman doubtless appeared natural and pleasing. To outsiders they were tedious; and the general impression of half-amused, half-bored wonderment is cleverly, though spitefully, expressed in the lines of the Rolliad:

Prim preacher, prince of priests and prince’s priest,[61] Pembroke’s pale pride, in Pitt’s praecordia placed, Thy merits all shall future ages scan, And prince be lost in parson Pretyman.

Among the most interesting parts of the bishop’s biography of Pitt are those in which he describes his attainments, and his studies at Pembroke Hall. The tutor found him, as Wilson expected, exceedingly well versed in the classics, so that he seldom met with any difficulties. Chatham had prescribed a careful study of Thucydides and Polybius; and the young undergraduate was often able, with little or no preparation, to translate six or seven pages of the former historian, without making more than one or two mistakes. This is very remarkable in a youth of fifteen; but his sense of the meaning and fitness of words seems to have been not less instinctive than his choice of language, which was soon to arouse the wonder and admiration of the most experienced debaters at Westminster.

As regards his mathematical attainments, Tomline states that he had already read the first six books of Euclid, and had mastered the elementary parts of Algebra, Trigonometry, and Natural Philosophy. The bent of his mind was towards the Humanities; but he had a good hold on mathematics, and became expert at the solution of problems. Newton’s Principia aroused his deepest admiration. Various notes on mathematical and astronomical subjects extant in the Pitt Papers (too fragmentary for reproduction here) show that he retained his interest in the exact sciences.[62]

At Cambridge, above all, he deepened his knowledge of the classics. The ease with which he deciphered so obscure a work as Lycophron’s “Cassandra” astonished even those who were familiar with his exceptional powers. Everything therefore conduced to give him an exceedingly wide and thorough knowledge of the literatures of Greece and Rome; for, fortunately for him, he had neither the need nor the inclination to bestow much time on the art of versifying in those languages, which absorbed, and still absorbs, so much of the energy of the dwellers by the Cam. Accordingly the life, thought, and statecraft of Athens and Rome became thoroughly familiar to him. His love for their masterpieces of art and imagination was profound; and the many comments in his handwriting on the margin of the chief authors suffice to refute the gibe of certain small-minded opponents, that he kept up his acquaintance with the classics in order to find tags for his speeches.[63] To some extent, it is true, his studies were directed towards his future vocation. At the wish of the Earl of Chatham, he bestowed great attention on the oratory of the ancients; and he seems to have bettered the precept by making critical notes on the speeches which he read, and remarking how the various arguments were, or might be, answered. Add to this a close and loving perusal of Shakespeare and Milton, and it will be seen that Pitt’s studies at Cambridge were such as invigorated the mind, cultivated his oratorical gift, and thoroughly equipped him for the parliamentary arena.

From Tomline we glean a few details which enable us to picture the young undergraduate in his surroundings. He states that his manners even at that early age were formed and his behaviour manly, that he mixed in conversation with unaffected vivacity and perfect ease. His habits were most regular; he never failed to attend morning and evening chapel except when prevented by ill health. Owing to his father’s habit of reading aloud a chapter of the Bible every day, his knowledge of the Holy Scripture was unusually good. Tomline mentions a circumstance which will serve also to illustrate Pitt’s powers of memory and fine sense of sound. On hearing his former tutor read portions of Scripture in support of his “Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles,” the statesman (it was in that anxious year, 1797) stopped him at one text with the remark--“I do not recollect that passage in the Bible, and it does not sound like Scripture.” He was right: the passage came from the Apocrypha, which he had not read.

The singular correctness of Pitt’s life while at Cambridge exposed him to the risk of becoming a bookworm and a prig. From this he was saved by his good sense and his ill-health. “The wonderful boy” was begged by his parents not to court the Muses too assiduously. Chatham’s fatherly anxiety and his love of classical allusions led him to run this metaphor to death; but the strained classicisms had the wished for effect. Pitt rode regularly and far. In the Pitt Papers (No. 221) I have found proof that, while at Cambridge, he was trained in the then essential art of fencing. At a later date his old fencing-master, Peter Renaud, sent to him a petition stating that he had “had the honour of teaching you when you was at Pembroke College,” and that in consequence of the decline in the habit of fencing, he was now in poverty, and therefore begged for help from his illustrious pupil.

We clutch at these trifles which show the drift of Pitt’s early habits; for the worthy Tomline, who had stacks, where we have only sheaves, does not condescend to notice them. From the Pitt Papers we can, however, in part reconstruct his Cambridge life. In his first term, Pitt described Pembroke as “a sober, staid college, and nothing but solid study there.” Fortunately, too, no exceptional privileges were accorded to Chatham’s favourite son. The father in his letter to the tutor had not claimed any, except those required on the score of health. Consequently though Pitt had the right to don the gorgeous gown of a “gentleman-commoner” (afterwards called “fellow commoner”), he did not do so. In his first letter to his father he stated that his cap was “to be stripped of its glories, in exchange for a plain loop and button.”[64] It is further pleasing to know that his father wished him not to make use of that tattered mediaeval privilege which allowed sons of noblemen to receive the degree without sitting for examination; and that persistent ill-health alone led him to resort unwillingly to this miserable expedient.

We are here reminded of Wordsworth’s reference to the sense of social equality to be found at Cambridge, even at a time when titled arrogance and old-world subservience ramped and cringed unchecked and unrelieved in most parts of the land. The lines are worthy of quotation because they show that the spirit prevalent at Cambridge, at least at St. John’s College, prepared the poet to sympathize with the French democracy. He speaks of Cambridge as

A Republic, where all stood thus far Upon equal ground, that we were brothers all In honour, as in one community, Scholars and gentlemen; where, furthermore, Distinction open lay to all that came, And wealth and titles were in less esteem Than talents, worth, and prosperous industry.

We do not know whether Pitt’s feelings at this time were akin to those of Wordsworth, who entered St. John’s in 1787. Pitt’s surroundings were not such as to favour the infiltration of new ideas. In his first two years he mixed scarcely at all with undergraduates, and even after 1776 his circle seems to have been limited, doubtless owing to his intense shyness, ill-health, and constant association with Dr. Pretyman. On 4th November 1776 he writes home that he had been spending a few days at the house of Lord Granby (the future Duke of Rutland), and had returned to the “sober hours and studies” of college; but he rarely refers to pastimes and relaxations.

His letters also contain few references to study; but one of these is worthy of notice. On 10th November 1776 he asked permission to attend a month’s course of lectures on Civil Law for the fee of five guineas; and later on he stated that they were “instructive and amusing,” besides requiring little extra work. In that term he took his degree in the manner aforesaid. Early in 1777 he moved to other rooms which were small but perfectly sheltered from wind and weather. About that time, too, he launched out more freely into social life, so we may judge from the not infrequent requests for increased supplies. On 30th June 1777 he writes that he has exceeded his allowance by £60, the first sign of that heedlessness in money matters which was to hamper him through life.

* * * * *

The chief feature of interest in these early letters is the frequent references to the politics of the time, which show that he kept the service of his country steadily in view. Thus, on 23rd March 1775 during vacation time at Hayes, he writes to his brother, begging him, if he leaves his pillow before noon, to find out the fate of Mr. Burke’s motion on behalf of conciliation with America. He signs the letters on behalf of “the Society at Hayes,” possibly a reference to a family debating club.[65] It is noteworthy that the struggle of the American colonists with George III was the first political event to arouse his interest, which must have been heightened by the fervid speeches of Chatham on the subject. A little later a side eddy must have set in, for his elder brother, Lord Pitt, on receiving his commission in 1774, joined his regiment, which was quartered successively at Quebec and Montreal. On 31st May 1775 William writes from Cambridge that the papers are full of the bad news from Boston, doubtless the fight at Lexington. Ten days later he requests Lady Chatham to send, along with the “Ethics,” Davenant on “Peace, War, and Alliance,” as it is not in any library in Cambridge. Clearly, then, the youth was alive to the legal and international questions then at stake.

Probably these wider interests carried him more into society. His friendship with Lord Granby, then an undergraduate, is more than once referred to; and thus was formed that connection which furthered Pitt’s career, and led to the sending of Lord Granby (after succeeding to the Dukedom of Rutland) to the Viceregal Lodge at Dublin. The Duke, it may be mentioned, bequeathed to Pitt the sum of £3,000.[66] Friendships formed at the University counted for much in times when court and governmental influence made or marred a man’s career. We may therefore note that as Pitt’s health improved during the last years at Cambridge, he also became friendly with the following: Lord Westmorland, Lord Euston, Lowther (Lord Lonsdale), Pratt (Lord Camden), Pepper Arden, Eliot, Bankes, Long, and St. John.

The name of him who was perhaps Pitt’s dearest friend is here conspicuous by its absence. Wilberforce saw little of Pitt at Cambridge, partly, perhaps, because he did not enter at St. John’s College until 1776 and then became associated with a dissolute set; but he made Pitt’s acquaintance towards the end of their time there, and the youths were mutually attracted by their brilliant conversational gifts and intellectual powers, which were to be sharpened by delightful intercourse at London and Wimbledon. In a passage penned in 1821, Wilberforce contrasts the comparative ill fortune of Pitt with the good fortune of his rival, Charles James Fox, who at Oxford made the acquaintance of a number of brilliant young men, Sheridan, Windham, Erskine, Hare, General Fitzpatrick, and Lord John Townshend. Nearly all of these, it is true, won distinction in public life; but it is scarcely fair to say that Pitt’s Cambridge friends (to whose number Wilberforce adds Lords Abercorn and Spencer) were deficient in parts. Their gifts, if less brilliant, were more solid than those of Fox and Sheridan. Lords Camden and Westmorland were to prove themselves able administrators, and the future Duke of Rutland, though showy and dissolute, displayed much ability as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Bankes “the precise” (as the Rolliad terms him) was a hard-hitter in debate; while the gentler qualities of Eliot endeared him both to Pitt and to his sister Harriet, whom he married in 1785.

Viewing the question more widely, we may surmise that Pitt’s career at Cambridge would have been more fruitful had he gone up somewhat later and mixed more with undergraduates, especially with good talkers. In that case we can imagine that the Grenville stiffness in him would almost have vanished. A bon vivant like Fox or North he could never have been; but the austerity of his life at Cambridge, save in its closing months, did not tend to cure him of the awkward shyness which Wilberforce noted as so prominent a trait in his character;[67] and thus he went forth into the life of Westminster weighted with that serious defect, an incapacity for making a wide circle of friends or winning over enemies. In a sense it may be said that Pitt took political life too seriously. He prepared for it from boyhood so strenuously as partly to stunt his social faculties, and thereby handicap himself for life. For in that age the political arena was the close preserve of the nobles, gentry, and nabobs, with whom a statesman could scarcely succeed unless he had the manners of the clubs and the instincts of a sportsman. A compromise between Lord Chatham and Tony Lumpkin would have made the ideal leader. As it was, there entered on the scene a compromise between Chatham and Aristides.

Pitt’s chief relaxation from the “sober studies” at Pembroke Hall was found in visits to the great debates at Westminster. The first of these visits belongs to the month of January 1775, when his father was pleading passionately for conciliation with America. Benjamin Franklin, the champion of the colonists, was present; and the orator clearly aimed at persuading our kinsmen beyond the seas that they had the sympathy of very many British hearts. Those two orations echoed far and wide amid the dales of New England and the rocks of the Alleghanies. What, then, must have been the effect of the living voice and of that superb presence, which trebled the power of every word, on a sensitive youth whose being ever thrilled responsive to that of his father? Language failed him to express his feelings. “Nothing prevented his speech,” so he wrote to his mother, “from being the most forcible that can be imagined, and [the] Administration fully felt it. The manner and matter both were striking; far beyond what I can express. It was everything which was superior; ... his first speech lasted above an hour and the second half an hour--surely the two finest speeches that ever were made, unless by himself.”[68] He heard also Chatham’s great effort of 30th May 1777, and describes it as marked by “a flow of eloquence and beauty of expression, animated and striking beyond expression.”

For Pitt, indeed, the chief delights of the vacations centred in St. Stephens. Never has there been a more eager listener to the debates; and here his method of studying the orators of Greece and Rome enabled him quickly to marshal the arguments of a speaker, assess them at their real worth, and fashion a retort. During one of his visits to the House of Lords he was introduced to Charles James Fox, already famous as the readiest debater in the Lower House. The Whig leader afterwards described the rapt attention with which the youth at his side listened to the speeches of the peers, and frequently turned to him with the remark: “But surely, Mr. Fox, that might be met thus,” or “Yes; but he lays himself open to this retort.” Little can Fox have imagined that these gifts, when whetted by maturity, were frequently to dash the hopes of the Whigs.[69]

The nice balancing of arguments, and the study of words, together with the art of voice production, may make a clever and persuasive speaker; but a great orator is he to whom such things are but trifling adornments, needful, indeed, for a complete equipment, but lost amidst the grander endowments of Nature, imagination and learning. Pitt excelled in the greater gifts no less than in the smaller graces. He had the advantage of a distinguished presence, a kindling eye, a sonorous voice; and to these excellences were added those of the mind, which outshone all adventitious aids. And these intellectual powers, which give weight to attack and cover a retreat, were cultivated with a wholeheartedness and persistence unparalleled in our annals. The pompous greetings of the Earl of Chatham to “the civilians and law of nations tribe” at Pembroke Hall show the thoroughness of his son’s application to law. It also seems probable that during the latter part of his stay at Cambridge he widened his outlook on public affairs by a study of Adam Smith’s great work, “The Wealth of Nations,” which appeared in 1776. He afterwards avowed himself a disciple of Adam Smith; and it is questionable whether he would have had time after leaving Cambridge thoroughly to master that work.

Books which bore upon the rise and fall of States seem to have engaged his attention, as was also the case with the young Napoleon--witness his copious notes on changes of dynasty and revolutions. In truth, those questions were then “in the air.” In 1748 Montesquieu had published his “Spirit of Laws”; Rousseau had brought out in 1762 his “Social Contract,” which Quinet has described as the seed of the French Revolution. Whether Pitt perused these works is doubtful; but it is clear that in his reading he had an eye for the causes that make or mar the fortunes of nations. Witness the remark in his letter of 19th March 1778, that nowhere in history could he find “any instance of a Nation so miserably sacrificed as this has been.”[70] He shared the general conviction that none but Chatham could steer the ship of State into safe waters; and deep must have been his concern when the King refused to hear of Chatham forming a new Ministry for the purpose of conciliation. No consideration, not even the loss of his Crown (so he wrote to Lord North) would induce him to “stoop to the Opposition.”[71]

Such conduct bordered on the insane now that France had made common cause with the United States; but there was no means of forcing the King’s hand. The majority in Parliament supported his Minister, Lord North; and little could be expected from the Earl of Chatham in view of his growing infirmities of mind and body. His haughty and exacting ways no less than his inconsistencies of aim had scattered his following; and it was but a shadow of a name that appeared in the House of Lords on 7th April 1778. Encased in flannel, looking deadly pale, but with something of the old gleam in his eyes, he entered, staying his tottering frame on his sons, William and James. He spoke twice, urging the House not to debase the monarchy by conceding full independence to America, still less by giving way before France. “Shall this great kingdom now fall prostrate before the House of Bourbon? If we must fall, let us fall like men.” Much of the speech was inconsistent with his former opinions; but the peers recked not of inconsistency; they listened with bated breath to words which recalled the glorious days of 1759--words which were to be prophetic both for himself and for his son. A second oratorical effort was too much for his overwrought frame. He pressed his hand to his heart and fell. The peers hard by caught him in their arms; his sons hurried up and helped to bear him to a house in Downing Street. Thence he was removed to Hayes, and there on 11th May 1778, in the midst of his family, he passed away.

For the greatest statesman and orator of his age there could be but one place of sepulture. The House of Commons unanimously voted an address for a public funeral and a monument in Westminster; and probably of all Englishmen there was only one who regretted the decision. George III had revealed the pettiness of his nature when, in a letter to Lord North, he referred to Chatham’s breakdown in the House of Lords as his “political exit.” He now stated that, unless the inscription on the monument dwelt only on Chatham’s influence in “rouzing the nation at the beginning of the last war,” the compliment paid to the deceased statesman would be “rather an offensive measure” to him personally.[72] “The Court do everything with an ill grace,” is William’s description of the preparations for the funeral.[73] No one represented the King at the funeral on 9th June, a fact which gave to the ceremony the appearance of a great popular demonstration. It was the last of Chatham’s triumphs.

Owing to the absence of the eldest son with his regiment, William was the chief mourner. Few of the beholders had any knowledge of his manifold gifts; and the crowds which gazed at the stately procession, as at the burial of England’s glories and hopes, could not surmise that the slim figure following the hearse was destined to retrieve the disasters of the present and to link once more the name of Pitt with a great work of national revival.

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III. POLITICAL APPRENTICESHIP

I cannot approve of the requisition, in the studies of future statesmen, of so much theoretical knowledge, by which young people are often ruined before their time, both in mind and body. When they enter into practical life, they possess indeed an immense stock of philosophical and learned material; but in the narrow circle of their calling this cannot be practically applied, and will therefore be forgotten as useless. On the other hand what they most needed they have lost: they are deficient in the necessary mental and bodily energy, which is quite indispensable when one would enter efficiently into practical life.--GOETHE.

The lives of English statesmen have very rarely, if ever, been enervated by that excessive zeal for education which the great German thinker discerned as a possible danger for his fellow countrymen. Certainly to those who had drunk deep of the learning of Leipzig, Heidelberg, or Göttingen, the transference to a Staats-secretariat at Weimar, Cassel, or even at Berlin, must have been a life of sheer drudgery. Doubtless, the doctrinaire policy of many a Continental State sprang from the persistent attempts of some Pegasus in harness to rise again to the serene heights of his youthful contemplations. In England our youths did not meditate on the science of politics. Both Oxford and Cambridge displayed a maternal care lest the brains of the rising generation should overtax the bodies; and never was the unsullied spring of Helicon ruffled by draughts taken under compulsion. Gibbon’s experience at Magdalen College in 1752–3, of the genial indifference of his first tutor, and the unblushing neglect of his successor, seems to have been quite normal; and it is clear that the curriculum of that wealthy corporation had not the remotest connection with any known form of activity outside its walls.

Pitt’s residence at Cambridge was more fruitful for the future. The dons of Pembroke Hall seem to have taken their duties less lightly than was the rule elsewhere; and Pitt’s lifelong gratitude to Dr. Pretyman may have been partly due to the unusual advancement in learning achieved under his watchful care. But even so, the regular studies had no bearing on the life of a statesman other than that which comes from an intelligent reading of the philosophers and historians of Greece and Rome. Pitt’s choice of lectures on Civil Law was his own. And, after taking his degree in the autumn of 1776, he seems largely to have followed the bent of his mind, which, as we have seen, led him to study the crises in national affairs, and the causes of welfare or decay. It is significant that the young Napoleon Bonaparte approached historical study in the same practical way.

Above all, Pitt haunted the precincts of Westminster, and there learnt to view politics, not as a science, but a strife. For him, therefore, there was little risk of being hampered by an ill-digested mass of theoretical learning as he faced the ever shifting problems of the Commonwealth; still less of undergoing the transition from the breezy uplands of philosophy to the political mill of some petty principality. It is the happy lot of Britain’s sons to come to ever widening spheres of activity; and their minds, never “sicklied o’er” at the outset, should possess the alertness and vigour which Goethe rightly praised as a better equipment than the best elaborated theories and the richest store of precedents. This natural course of development ought to produce not doctrinaires, but statesmen.

* * * * *

The chief misfortunes of Pitt’s early life were his appalling precocity, which the Earl of Chatham in no wise checked, and the sense of responsibility thrust upon him all too soon by the terrible bereavement described above. As the eldest son was then abroad with his regiment, William was at once involved in a network of cares. The finances of the family were in an embarrassed state. Chatham’s habits had been so lavish, and his conduct in official life so honourably scrupulous, that the estate was encumbered with debts. Parliament voted the sum of £20,000 towards their payment; but, if we may judge from one of the later letters of Lady Chatham, embarrassments at times continued to beset her.[74] William also inherited property which was to yield little more than an annual income of £250--a sum inadequate to meet the demands of an ambitious youth in an age when money no less than family standing served as the passport to a public career.

Nevertheless, the lack of resources seems to have stimulated energies that were ever braced by difficulty. About five months after the funeral of his father, we find him expressing to Lady Chatham his resolve to take rooms at Lincoln’s Inn. In his view practice at the Bar was invaluable as a training for that wider and grander service to which he had early vowed himself.

In one important particular Pitt’s conduct showed singular foresight. He did not, as might have been expected in days when travelling was slow and expensive, give up his rooms at Pembroke Hall, but for nearly two years he continued usually to reside there, even while keeping his terms at Lincoln’s Inn. Extravagant though this arrangement seemed to be, it was based on prudential motives. In the miserable condition in which public affairs then were, he judged that a dissolution of Parliament could not be long deferred; and the chance of winning a seat at his University seemed to him, though still in his teens, greater than at an ordinary constituency, where the deep pockets of grandees or nabobs must mar his prospect.[75]

About Cambridge, then, his hopes fondly clustered, seeing that it was “a seat of all others the most desirable, as being free from expense, perfectly independent, and I think in every respect extremely honourable.”[76] The words have the ring of manly determination which marks all his public utterances.

The following letter of his to Mr. John (afterwards Lord) Townshend, then one of the members for the University, marks the first official announcement of his intentions:

Pembroke Hall, July 15 1779.

DEAR TOWNSHEND,

The very earnest and sincere wishes I expressed for your success in the late contest for the University of Cambridge, might perhaps lead you to imagine that I should take a similar part on every future occasion. I was therefore very sorry that it was not in my power to explain to you my situation when I had the pleasure of seeing you here. But, having since finally determined to offer myself a candidate for the University at the General Election, I am desirous of giving you immediate notice of a circumstance of which I imagine you will be glad to be apprised as soon as possible.

W. PITT.[77]

At the same time he informed his uncle, Earl Temple, of his resolve, and received the following reply. The italicizing of the Christian name speaks for itself:

Stowe, July 18 1779.

I cannot, my dear William, but interest myself most warmly in whatever relates to your honour or interest; I therefore learn with singular pleasure the hopes you conceive that the good old lady, the alma mater of Cambridge, may be inclined to treat you as her most favourite son. Such a testimony at your age from a learned body cannot but be very flattering. As to your prospect of success, I cannot form any opinion, being totally unacquainted with every circumstance but that of your merit. You must therefore be [sic] at present to receive from me nothing but sincere assurances of my best good wishes and readiness to serve you as may be in my power. 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 and expose yourself to the sweet music of those lovely syrens, which have already seduced your cousin Thomas from the destined and determined object of his life, is a matter of great doubt, and the reflection that it is so may prove some consolation to you should you not succeed. The memory of your father and 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, at least if I may guess at your university by her good sister. All therefore I can say further is to recommend to you very thoroughly to examine the foundation of your hopes before you engage, not suffering your conduct to be warped by your wishes; because, if from the event this measure shall appear to be lightly taken up, such an outset in life will diminish much of those high expectations which you have so deservedly raised. Your young old friend and namesake salutes you very kindly and gratefully, Hester and Catherine very affectionately, without forgetting that antient spinster Mrs. Stapleton. We shall be happy to receive you here, candidate or no candidate....[78]

TEMPLE.

Despite this response, Pitt resolved to persevere, and that too, though the political horizon had darkened owing to the declaration of war by Spain. At first he avowed his deep concern at this event; but the note of hopefulness, which is never long absent from his letters, soon begins to reassert itself in the expression of a belief that this new danger may “be productive of some good effects at home, and that there may still be spirit and resources in the country sufficient to preserve at least the remnant of a great empire.” This forecast was justified. The struggle became one for national existence, waged against our hereditary rivals, the monarchs of the House of Bourbon; and the searchings of heart of England’s sons, at warring against their own kith and kin, were in large measure stilled. The thrilling incidents that accompanied the three years’ siege of Gibraltar by the Spaniards, our successes in India, and the naval triumphs of the closing years of the war showed the hardening of the nation’s fibre under the strain of adversity and danger.

After residing at Burton Pynsent for some weeks in the autumn in order to reassure Lady Chatham while the invasion-scare was at its height, Pitt returned to Cambridge at the close of the year, and settled down at Lincoln’s Inn in the early weeks of 1780. Thanks to the kindness of his uncle, Earl Temple, he had been able to procure a lease of rooms on the north side of the attic of staircase number 4 of Stone Buildings (those nearest to Holborn). The sum of £1,100, which in November 1778 he had pronounced “frightful,” had been advanced on the property which Pitt was to inherit when he came of age.

Concerning Pitt’s life at Lincoln’s Inn we know next to nothing. The lack of official records of the Inns of Court, except unilluminating entries of dates, thwarts all efforts at reconstructing the early life of many famous men; and the denseness of the gloom which surrounds our institutions, academic and legal, is apt to provoke the investigator to unpatriotic reflections. Is there any French statesman of modern times about whose early career the records of the institutions with which he was associated are so scanty and uninteresting as are those of Cambridge and Lincoln’s Inn concerning the life of the brilliant son of Chatham?

As it is, the investigator at Lincoln’s Inn can discover little more than that Pitt was called to the Bar on 12th June 1780, and that on the next day a lease was taken out for his rooms for three “lives,” namely, John, Earl of Chatham, aged 23, William Pitt, aged 21, and James Charles Pitt, aged 18. The rent was £9 9_s._ 10_d._ per annum.[79]

The great preoccupation of Pitt, apart from the ever-pressing topic of national danger, was the movement for Economic Reform. Originating at York in December 1779, it gathered volume until the petitioners in that county alone numbered more than 8,000 freeholders. East Anglia responded to the call of Yorkshire; and Pitt hoped to see London rally to the cause of purity and political freedom. If ever there was a chance of sweeping away the network of sinecures whereby the King kept his hold on the House of Commons, it was now, when the growth of debt and taxation rendered economy in non-essentials the most urgent of public duties.

In February 1780 Burke introduced his proposals for Economic Reform in a speech of great ability. He sought, firstly, to abolish the special jurisdictions in Wales and Cheshire and in the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall, which formed petty and extravagant and corrupt governments. The great orator, like a forensic retiarius, sought to enfold his great enemy, Corruption, within the cloak of humour which he thus deftly threw in front. Affecting the desire to free the royal prerogative from irritating and absurd local restrictions, he proceeded thus: “Cross a brook, and you lose the King of England, but you have some comfort in coming again under His Majesty, though shorn of his beams, and no more than Prince of Wales. Go to the north and you find him dwindled to a Duke of Lancaster. Turn to the west of that north, and he hops upon you in the humble character of the Earl of Chester.” Equally difficult and important was Burke’s attempt to reduce the Civil List and lessen the number of sinecures attached to the King’s household. He sought to abolish the offices of Master of the Household, Treasurer, Comptroller, Cofferer, Treasurer of the Chamber, the whole Board of Green-Cloth, the Wardrobe and Jewel Offices, the Board of Works, and the Keepers of stag-hounds, buck-hounds, fox-hounds, and harriers, and other well-paid sinecures. With playful irony he described the clatter of white-sticks and yellow-sticks about the head of a reformer who would touch those offices, or sought to exclude the King’s turnspit from Parliament. As regarded the Civil List, he proposed to fix its amount immutably, to transfer to the general fund accounts which had ceased properly to belong to the King’s private purse, and to regulate the whole on business-like principles. He also urged the suppression of useless offices in the general administration, especially the newly created Secretaryship for the Colonies and the Board of Trade, the latter of which then formed a desirable sinecure for eight members of Parliament.[80] Most important of all, perhaps, was the proposal, brought in by Sir Philip Clerk, to exclude from Parliament contractors--a class which had been proved to have battened on the funds, and to have urged the continuance of the war.

Had Burke’s proposals stood in need of further vindication, it would have been supplied by the mysterious fate which befell them. Members of Parliament with scarcely an exception loudly commended the measure, and the eloquence and power with which Burke introduced it to the House. About the same time Lord Shelburne brought forward in the Upper House damning proofs of the greed of contractors and of the gross carelessness with which accounts were kept at the Admiralty and War Office.[81] The defence of ministers was strong only in personalities. Argument there was none; and it seemed that the whole festering sudd of corruption must be swept away by the flood of popular indignation.

From three of Pitt’s letters, those of 9th and 26th February and 14th March 1780, we can imagine the high hopes of the young reformer as he listened to the scathing attack on Ministers by Lord Shelburne, and the comprehensive indictment framed by Burke. In the second letter he notes with joy the drop of the ministerial majority to two; and in the small hours of 14th March he was privileged to witness the stormy scene which occurred when Burke by a majority of eight carried his motion for abolishing the Board of Trade. And yet the sudd did not move. Despite the success of reformers in the House, and the growing excitement among their associations in the country, the clogging influences of the past prevailed. Members who praised Burke for his lofty and statesmanlike aims, voted in committee against the details of his scheme. Little by little it disappeared; and, in face of the greed, cowardice, or apathy of Parliament, Burke soon declared his indifference as to the fate of the few remaining clauses of his measure. The bill for the exclusion of contractors from Parliament passed the Commons, but was thrown out by the Lords.

Another surprise was in store for the House and the country. On 6th April Mr. Dunning brought forward a motion that “the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be lessened.” The motion was made suddenly and on the day when numerous petitions were laid on the table, signed by thousands of persons, on behalf of shorter parliaments and a larger addition to the representatives of counties who, as a rule, showed some independence. The proposal produced a great sensation. Ministers seemed to be “stunned.” Pitt’s relative, Thomas Pitt of Boccanoc, ably supported this daring motion. The Speaker himself left the chair and spoke in support of it, and the resolution, after a trifling change of form, was passed by a majority of eighteen. But again the forces of obscurantism triumphed. Apparently Dunning owed his success solely to the fear of the imminence of a general election, and as that fear lessened, so also did the numbers of the popular party in the House. North slowly but surely regained his hold on the waverers, and succeeded in defeating a motion begging the King not to dissolve or prorogue Parliament until steps had been taken to diminish the influence of the Crown at elections (24th April).

For the present Pitt stifled his disappointment at this fiasco by attendance at the opera and masquerades, so we may judge from his letters; but he probably hardened his resolve to effect the Reform of Parliament itself, which, as was now clear to all but Burke, must precede any attempt to cleanse the Augean stables of the Court and the Administration. That gifted thinker but somewhat erratic politician, whose character will concern us later, had gone so far as to defend the state of the representation and to urge reformers to concentrate their efforts on the task of freeing Parliament from the corrupt influences that were warping its character. To this belief he still clung, in spite of the recent damning proof that a Parliament of place-hunters and borough-mongers had refused to root out the canker of corruption, even at a time of great national danger. Pitt, for his part, looked for safety to that course of action which Chatham had so often taken; he turned away from Parliament and fixed his hopes in the nation. Even the oratory of Burke failed to satisfy him. He found in his great speech of 11th February not only “real beauties,” but “ridiculous affectations.” He added, however, in his letter of 14th March: “I have heard two less studied harangues from him since in reply that please me much more than this does now that it is upon paper.” This criticism, coming from the son of Chatham, is a little surprising; but it may be considered symptomatic. As will appear later, there was something in Burke’s temperament which jarred on the young statesman.

While disagreeing with Burke and the more academic wing of the reformers, Pitt did not consort with the men on the extreme left who now raised a great clamour through the country. He seems to have had no dealings at this time with the Reform or “Œconomic” Associations; and events now occurred which helped for a time to distract his attention from politics. While he was expecting to be called to the Bar, London fell a prey to the Lord George Gordon rioters (2nd to 9th June).

What must have been the disgust of the young patrician as he gazed at the scenes of rapine and drunkenness which went on under the name of Protestantism! The pretence of bigotry was soon flung aside, and then, when the thin crust of civilization was removed, men saw appalled the depths of villany that usually are hidden. For days the passions of the mob raged unchecked by timorous magistrates and ministers. The King alone was undismayed, and finally insisted on the use of vigorous measures. Thanks to his staunchness, the wheels of government began to move once more. Then the orgy quickly died down; but it left men with a dread of the newly-revealed Caliban, and a heightened respect for the one man whose firmness had ensured the vindication of law and order. How much the popular cause then suffered can never be known. When, in the course of the French Revolution, the Parisian mob carried the King and Queen from Versailles to Paris and completed its triumph at the harvest time of 1792, Englishmen viewed those events in the lurid light thrown by the flames of the Lord George Gordon riots; and it is probable that Pitt himself was no stranger to this feeling.

The cause of Parliamentary Reform in England also suffered untold harm. Why talk about manhood suffrage, vote by ballot and annual Parliaments, as the Westminster Committee had talked, when all around were proofs of the savagery of the many-headed monster? The Duke of Richmond, who then, along with Fox, advocated a programme of reform which was to furnish the Chartists with their “six points,” confessed in a letter to Shelburne that the riots “will tend to discredit any attempts of the people to do themselves justice on any future occasion when the cause may warrant it”;[82] and though Charles James Fox retained his faith in the cause, yet he and all other democrats thenceforth found it a hopeless task to roll the stone up to the point to which the enthusiasm of the people carried it in the spring of 1780. After midsummer of that year the various committees and associations preached to deaf ears. The King had won.

To return to Pitt’s fortunes, we may note that Lincoln’s Inn had been in no immediate danger from the rioters, though surrounded with flames on all sides. In order to be ready for the worst, the benchers took arms and formed a corps, in which Pitt had his first experience of volunteering. The records of the Inn, however, show that it was also defended by 800 men of the Northumberland Militia, the sum of £364 12_s._ 0_d._ being paid for provisions to them for the ten days during which they were in garrison.[83]

The desire of the resident members of the Inn worthily to entertain the officers of that corps led to the appointment of a committee for that purpose, which included Pitt, Pepper Arden (afterwards Lord Alvanley), Mitford (afterwards Lord Redesdale), Bland Burges, and three others. The last named, in his reminiscences, tells how, when his turn came, he invited Gibbon and Lord Carmarthen to meet four officers and other company at dinner. The historian, as is well known, was a most entertaining talker, flitting easily from one topic to another, and lighting up all with sallies of wit which the listeners were expected to receive with deferential applause and unquestioning mirth. Judge then of his astonishment, when, after one of his best foreign anecdotes, which touched on “the fashionable levities of political doctrine then prevalent,” a deep but clear voice was heard from the far end of the table calmly but civilly impugning the correctness of the story and the propriety of its political connexion. The applause ceased at once, and Gibbon turned his gaze petulantly on the slim youth who had dared to challenge his unquestioned supremacy, and sat there quietly eating grapes. As the interruption had been hailed with too much approval to be ignored or dismissed with a frown, he endeavoured to crush the youth by heavy artillery. A spirited fire came in return, and a sharp duel of wits began, which the company followed with the keenest interest. Finally the skill and vigour of the attack drove the historian from one position after another and left him defenceless; whereupon he left the room in high dudgeon. In vain did Bland Burges seek in the anteroom to calm his feelings and persuade him to return. “By no means,” replied Gibbon; “that young gentleman is, I have no doubt, extremely ingenious and agreeable, but I must acknowledge that his style of conversation is not exactly what I am accustomed to, so you must positively excuse me.” Meanwhile Pitt continued to hold forth on the topic in dispute, “which he discussed with such ability, strength of argument, and eloquence, that his hearers were filled with profound admiration.”[84]

Such was the first recorded triumph of Pitt. Would that we knew more than the bare outlines of the discussion! But an unkind fate has vouchsafed here, as at so many points, enough of information to whet the appetite for more, enough to give us the merest glimpse of those surprising powers which easily discomfited Gibbon at his prime.

We know little about the extent of Pitt’s legal attainments or his skill as a pleader. His practice was to last but a short time. Three days after the end of the riots he was called to the Bar and afterwards went on the Western Circuit, of which he was a member. As to the impression aroused by his pleading, I have found very few particulars except the statement in an almost contemporary biography that his first case, which must have been in London, was one concerning an East India trade dispute, and that he attracted the notice of Lord Mansfield on the Bench. He is said to have acted as junior counsel in several cases at Dorchester and Exeter, and to have commanded attention by the force of his reasoning rather than attracted it by playing upon the emotions. His style, in short, was clear and argumentative rather than “attractive and passionate.”[85] From Exeter he was recalled in haste by news which was of far higher interest to him than the quarrels of Wessex squires and traders. The King had dissolved Parliament and had fixed 31st October for the date of assembly of its successor.

This action was what might have been expected from the most astute of electioneering agents. Disgust at the excesses of the Gordon rioters was still the dominant motive in the political world, and at such a time men looked askance at Reform. Further, in order to ensure the success of what he termed “my cause,” George III condescended to the arts of the canvasser, entering the shop of a draper at Windsor, and saying in his quick peremptory way--“The queen wants a gown, wants a gown. No Keppel. No Keppel.” Windsor rejected Keppel; Burke failed to keep his seat at Bristol; and Pitt made no impression whatever on the Toryism of the University of Cambridge. In any case his election was highly improbable. Dons and country clergymen are not wont to favour the claims of a young and unknown candidate; but the trend of thought at that time made his defeat certain.

He bore it with his usual serenity. “Mansfield and Townshend have run away with the prize,” so he wrote on 16th September, “but my struggle has not been dishonourable.” He now once more betook himself to legal affairs at Lincoln’s Inn, but his thoughts still centred in Westminster. Despite the stagnation which marked our public life after the victory of the King and Lord North at the general election, the fate of the commonwealth drew Pitt to St. Stephen’s for the earlier half of every day. His regular attendance at the House was perhaps instrumental in furthering his dearest hopes. The Duke of Rutland had been on cordial terms with Pitt at Cambridge; and he now mentioned the talents of his friend to Sir James Lowther. That magnate of Cumberland, who could secure the return of eleven candidates, welcomed the suggestion that Pitt should enter Parliament for one of his seats, and, with a generosity none too common among owners of “pocket boroughs,” offered him a seat at Appleby unconditionally, save that he (Pitt) was to resign his seat if his political views should in the future become opposed to those of his patron.[86]

To this condition even the proud son of Chatham could not demur; and, though the connection with what was practically a pocket borough could not be quite palatable to a reformer, yet he doubtless remembered that his father first entered Parliament as member for Old Sarum.

While we smile at the vagaries of the old system, which enabled “the great commoner” to begin his public career as representative of an untenanted mound, and his son as member for a town which he did not even visit, let us remember that occasionally it opened a door easily for a man of genius. Gladstone, in his Tory years, eulogized the system on these grounds;[87] and it is certainly remarkable that, besides the two Pitts, many other famous men used these stepping-stones. Burke, through most of his public life, was member for a pocket borough, Wendover or Malton; and Canning entered Parliament as member for a scarcely discoverable village, Newtown, in the Isle of Wight. Fox and Peel also entered Parliament by similar means. However quaintly the old order of things misrepresented the British people, it did now and then help to bring brilliant men to the front with a speed that is no longer possible. But it is noteworthy that young men of spirit took care to be soon quit of pocket boroughs.[88]

Appleby having duly registered the decree of Sir James Lowther at the close of 1780, Pitt took his seat in the House of Commons on 23rd January 1781. From that time to the very same day in the year 1806 when he breathed his last, he was to expend his life in strenuous efforts throughout a quarter of a century which comprised such events as the close of the American War, the new grouping of the Powers of Europe, the French Revolution, and the rise of Napoleon.

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IV. AT WESTMINSTER AND GOOSTREE’S

A series of undesigned changes brought the English Constitution to such a condition that satisfaction and impatience, the two great sources of political conduct, were both reasonably gratified by it.--SIR HENRY MAINE.

In the present age, marked by peaceful relations between the different parts of the Empire and by complete accord between the sovereign and his people, it is difficult to realize the condition of public affairs at the time when Pitt entered Parliament. The war with the United States, France, Spain and Holland, threatened the ruin of the nation, and it further brought to a climax a constitutional crisis of great importance. That struggle had resulted in no small measure from the personal methods of rule of George III; and, despite the disastrous influence of that policy on the Empire, there was still the chance of its winning at Westminster.

The reason for this paradox is to be found in the composition of the House of Commons and in the character of the King. Ten years had elapsed since the publication of Burke’s indictment, that, whereas in the previous century the distempers of monarchy had been the chief cause for fear, now the main apprehension centred in the distempers of Parliament.[89] The facts given above, and those soon to be set forth, will show that the danger was still acute. The rallying of practically the whole of the Tory party to the King’s side, the division of the Whigs into two chief groups, neither of which had any definite programme, the enormous power which the monarch wielded over the members of the Lower House by means of “influence,” and, last but not least, the revival of his prestige owing to the Lord George Gordon crisis, all served to strengthen his hand even against reformers who struggled for peace abroad and economy and purity in the administration.

In fact, the disintegration of the party system and the corruption of the House of Commons had provided George III with a most favourable opportunity for realizing the ideals set forth in Bolingbroke’s “Patriot King.” The old parties had for the time lost their raison d’être. All but a few fossilized Tory squires had given up the cause of the Stuarts. The Whigs could no longer claim to be defenders of the House of Brunswick and the liberties of England. For more than a century they had settled down comfortably on the spoils of office, until the sight of their magnates affecting to slay the slain and battening on the nation’s spoils aroused general resentment. Of this feeling the King had made dexterous use. In the name of the nation he claimed to set aside the parties and govern in the interests of the whole. As generally happens in such cases, he called into being another party, the King’s Friends, which, under the guise of acting for the nation, gradually ensured the subservience of Parliament to the royal will. By dint of honours, places, and money, the new policy won its way, until, as we have seen, it could defy the efforts for Reform. To the eye of alarmed patriots it seemed that the House of Commons would soon be little more than a tool of the King, and that George III would succeed in the enterprise which had cost Charles I his head.

There were some grounds for these fears. George III was on the whole a more formidable opponent than the first Charles. While lacking the personal charm of the Stuart sovereign and his power of calling forth enthusiastic service, he far excelled him in common sense and the power of adapting means to ends. Both men believed thoroughly in their cause, struggled with obstinate persistence towards the goal, and yet showed great finesse in the use to which they put men and events. Outwardly and mentally, they had nothing in common. Yet the parallel between them is closer than would at first sight appear. In a political sense George III is a rather gross replica of Charles I. Even the highest of Anglicans has never been tempted to canonize him; for, in truth, he lived in a material age, and had too great a belief in material interests ever to be in danger of “martyrdom.”

Here, perhaps, lay the real danger to the liberties of England in the decade, 1770–80. They are more likely to be undermined by an appeal to material interests than by an open attack. Charles was foolish enough to assail both the consciences and the pockets of his subjects. George left consciences alone, and made use of the pockets of the governing classes to achieve his ends. This sapping process was more likely to succeed than a hasty attack above ground. The policy of Charles I braced men to resistance; that of George III drugged and enervated them.[90] Early in the seventeenth century Parliament was the champion of the nation’s liberties; now there was some fear that it might degenerate into a King’s Council. Parliament is but the register of the nation’s will; and torpor at St. Stephen’s bespoke political deadness throughout the land. Here, perhaps, was the most threatening symptom of all. The attempt to manipulate Parliament could come near to success only in an age of high living and plain thinking. Even the disasters of the American War did not awaken England at once. Her monitor was sleeping the sleep of surfeit. What were defeats on the other side of the Atlantic to the members for the pocket boroughs who virtually controlled the House for the King’s cause? To what effect was it that London and Westminster now and again chafed at the losses of the war, when those cities returned only eight members, as against Cornwall’s forty-four? Episodes like those connected with the names of Wilkes and Lord George Gordon roused for a time storms of tropical violence; but when they died down there ensued long and enervating lulls. All went on once more as in a land of lotus-eaters, who scarcely heeded the dim mutterings that came across the western ocean. Even the disaster at Yorktown, which virtually ended the American War, did not thoroughly arouse the nation. Two months after the receipt of that news, Romilly wrote to a friend, “The nation seems fallen into a deep sleep.”[91]

The distributor of the soporific fruit seemed to be equal to every emergency. Lord North was a coarse and heavy man, with a wide mouth, thick lips, and puffy cheeks, which seemed typical of his policy. He resembled Walpole in his knowledge of men’s foibles and contempt of humanity. True, he excelled him in affability; but he signally fell behind him in the sterner qualities which master men and beat down obstacles. For eleven years he had been chief Minister of the Crown, latterly much against his will; and for fourteen months more the imperious monarch was to hold him to his post.

With Lord North were associated in the year 1781 men who were fully contented with the task of supervising their own departments and the patronage belonging to them. The most noteworthy of these Ministers were Lord Thurlow, a man of low tastes and violent temper, but considerable gifts for intrigue, who acted officially as Lord Chancellor and unofficially as chief of “the King’s friends”; Earl Bathurst, Lord President; Germain (Viscount Sackville), Secretary of State for the Colonies; Lord Townshend, Master of the Ordnance; Mr. Jenkinson (afterwards the Earl of Liverpool), Secretary at War; the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty; the Earl of Carlisle, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland; and Mr. William Eden (afterwards Lord Auckland), Chief Secretary at Dublin Castle. The personality of some of these men will appear more fitly in the sequel. Here we may note that they resembled highly paid confidential clerks, working under the general direction of the King, rather than responsible Ministers. Of collective action and responsibility there was little under Lord North.[92] George III acted on the principle that had guided the Caesars, Divide et impera.

Such, in brief, was the system and such were the men who now had to confront a world in arms. Apart from the interminable conflict in America, the area of strife was spreading in Europe; for the Dutch, incensed by our maritime policy, were on the point of declaring war. In India Hyder Ali was ravaging the Carnatic; and Britons, looking forth in fear from Madras, could see the clouds of smoke that told of his devastations. In the Mediterranean Gibraltar still stoutly held out against the Franco-Spanish forces, but our possession, Minorca, was soon to fall. In the Baltic the League of the Armed Neutrality held the sword dangling over Briton’s commerce, and was kept from striking only by the skill of Sir James Harris, our envoy at St. Petersburg, in playing on the foibles of Catharine II.

Yet against most of these difficulties British energy ultimately made headway; and they did not at present disturb the course of events in Parliament, with which we are here more especially concerned. The Opposition was divided into two chief groups, which had not yet begun to coalesce under the pressure of national calamity. The larger of these was the official Whig party under the nominal leadership of the Marquis of Rockingham, an affable and tactful man, with little strength of character, formidable only from his connections with the great Whig Houses. Among his followers two men stood forth, of powers so great and varied as to claim our attention at once. These were Fox and Burke.

Charles James Fox (1749–1806), the second son of Lord Holland, was now in the prime of his powers. Nature had dowered him with gifts so rich and varied as not to have been seriously marred even by the dissipations into which his father had encouraged him to plunge before he left Eton. While at Hertford College, Oxford, he gave proofs of his eager, vivacious, lovable temperament, and imbibed that passion for the classics and for all great literature which was to be his solace through life. Well would it have been for him had this been his only passion; unfortunately he never shook off the vices contracted in youth. His amour with Mrs. Armstead was notorious and avowed. Equally harmful was his mania for gambling. Many a time he ruined his speeches in the House by the fatigue or annoyance due to the losses of an all-night sitting at Brooks’s. But whether he lost or won, whether caressed by Ministers in Parliament or turned out of his rooms in St. James’s Street by Jews and bailiffs,[93] he was ever beloved, even by those whom he belaboured in the House.

His oratorical gifts were the outcome of a powerful mind, and they were enhanced by a melodious voice and forcible action. Perhaps the greatest charm of his speeches was their ease and naturalness. He spoke as if without premeditation, and at times he indulged in repetitions and digressions to an unpardonable extent. But all such faults and occasional carelessness in the choice of words scarcely lessened the effect of his efforts, which seemed to his hearers to be above all art. The unfailing vigour of thought, the power with which he could first recapitulate the arguments of his opponents and then tear them in pieces, and the good humour, which rarely left him even in his most scornful moods, served alike to convince and captivate the House. He was the prince of debaters, surpassing even Chatham himself in ease, wit, skill, and versatility, though lacking that awe-inspiring faculty that swayed Parliament as with a Jove-like frown. The years 1780–82 saw him at the height of his powers. Grattan afterwards remarked that no one could realize the force of Fox’s oratory who had not heard him before his unnatural coalition with Lord North in 1783, after which event he always seemed on the defensive: “the mouth still spoke great things, but the swell of soul was no more.”[94] How great must have been his blunders and indiscretions, both in public and private life, to have blighted a career of so transcendent a promise.

The figure of Edmund Burke belongs rather to the sphere of literature and political philosophy than to that of political action. Great in thought and great in his powers of oratory, he yet failed to impress the House of Commons, or the public at large; his speeches were too ornate, too overburdened with learning and reasoning, to please an audience that is plain, practical, and apt to be impressed more by the speaker himself than by the fullness of his arguments or the beauty of his style. In a word, Burke lacked the indefinable gift which Chatham, Fox, and Mirabeau so abundantly possessed--that of personality. His figure had not the forceful massiveness of that of Fox, and it wanted the dignity of the younger Pitt. Moreover his voice was harsh, and his action clumsy. His philosophic love of wedding facts to principles often led him to soar to heights where the question at issue appeared like a speck and votes a vulgar impertinence. Worst fault of all, his speeches were far too long. The fullness and richness which delights us to-day then had the effect of emptying the House. The result of it all was the decline of his influence and the increase of his irritability, Celtic vivacity leading him more than once shrilly to chide friends who sought to pull him back to his seat. These failings, together with the number of his impecunious relatives, probably explain why he never attained to Cabinet rank. In a subordinate office in the year 1783 he showed signal want of tact and discernment. Thus, in contrasting the effect produced by the perusal of his great orations with that which gained him the nickname of the dinner-bell of the House, one is reminded of the truth of the bitter line levelled at him by Goldsmith:

And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.

The other group, which rivalled the official Whigs in the zeal of its opposition to Lord North, was that of the former followers of Chatham. They had neither organization nor a programme; but in general they inherited the imperial sentiments and non-partisan traditions of that great leader. They were less eager than the Rockingham group for parliamentary reform and the limiting of the royal prerogative; but, like the Girondins of the French Revolution, the indefiniteness of their aims left much liberty of action to their following; and Pitt, who naturally attached himself to this group, rivalled Fox in his zeal for Reform, both economic and parliamentary.

The leader of the Chathamites was the Earl of Shelburne, who had been driven into opposition by the arbitrary conduct of the King at the time of the Wilkes affair. The estimates of his character are very diverse. Burke wrote of him privately in 1783 as “this wicked man, and no less weak and stupid than false and hypocritical,” his chief crime being that of breaking in pieces the Whig party. Few persons would have gone so far as the vehement Irishman, who, on these lower levels, allowed party passion to dull his eagle glance. Shelburne was one of the grands seigneurs and political thinkers of the time. Polite and courtly, he dazzled men by the splendour of his hospitality. In his library he shone as a scholar and philosopher, and his conversation was the index of his keen and supple intellect. In public life he showed that he never lacked courage. Yet there was always something wanting about Shelburne. His speech and manner passed so quickly and easily from the affable to the severe as to beget feelings of distrust. His enemies accused him of duplicity and dubbed him Malagrida, a well-known Portuguese Jesuit.[95]

We may note here that Pitt either shared or deferred to the general feeling about Shelburne when he omitted him from his Cabinet in December 1783.

Some of the specific charges against Shelburne (and most of them are vague) have vanished now that the mists of passion, amidst which he ever moved, have cleared away.[96] It is the lot of some men to arouse undeserved dislike or distrust, owing to unfortunate mannerisms. Yet it is certain that England owes much to the earl. He was one of the first to espouse the Free Trade principles of Adam Smith; he was chiefly responsible for the terms of peace of 1782–3; and the admiration of Benjamin Franklin for him largely conduced to the signature of the preliminaries with the United States. Posterity has therefore accorded to him a far higher place than was allowed by the jealousy or pettiness of his contemporaries. Such was the leader to whom Pitt attached himself.

On 25th January 1781 Shelburne protested manfully against the overbearing conduct of our Government in ordering the capture of Dutch merchantmen before the outbreak of war, and inveighed against the policy of the Ministry as fatal to liberty and to the welfare of the Empire. Finally he declared that the tactics of Government had proved that the conquest of the American colonies, if it could be accomplished, would entail fatal results at home; that he would be better pleased to see his country free, though curtailed in power and wealth, than acquiring greatness, if greatness were to be purchased at the expense of her constitution and liberty. The speech rang true to the traditions of Chatham; and it awoke responsive echoes in the breast of his son.[97]

Within the space of five weeks Pitt proved that his support was of the highest value. In a maiden speech, which perhaps bears away the palm from the first efforts of the greatest orators of all time, he gave proof of those astonishing powers which nature seemed to have implanted in a state of maturity. Practice and experience were to perfect them; but they then left on all his hearers an impression of wonder as at something almost supernatural in a youth of twenty-one years. This feeling was all the more natural as the speech dealt with economic subjects, which Wilberforce regarded as “of a low and vulgarizing quality.”[98]

We must pause here to notice that the topic of economy was at that time of burning interest. On the whole it excited more general attention than the subject of parliamentary reform. In fact the latter was insisted on by practical men mainly with the view of stopping the frightful waste that resulted from sinecures, jobs, and other forms of corruption in the public service. Rigid doctrinaires like Major Cartwright might dilate on the heaven-born right of every man to have a vote, or depict the beauty of an electoral system which enlisted the virtuous energies of every citizen and called on him to renew Parliament every year, that being the natural time of renewal of all things.[99] A still stiffer theorist, Jebb, might go further and insist on the election of a new Parliament for each session. Together they might call for the ballot, equal electoral areas, and payment of members. Yet their arguments would have fallen on deaf ears but for the strain of war taxes, the dullness of trade, and the blunderings of placemen high in office. When London, Bristol, and Yorkshire felt the pinch of hard times, national expenditure became a matter of the most urgent concern.

It was in support of Burke’s proposals for the better regulation of the King’s Civil List and for abolishing several sinecures that Pitt made his maiden speech in the House (26th February 1781). At once he lifted the subject to a high level. The measure, he said, would have come with more grace, and with more benefit to the public service, had it sprung from the royal breast. Ministers ought themselves to have proposed it, thereby showing that His Majesty desired to participate in the suffering of the Empire.

They ought to consult the glory of their royal master, and seat him in the hearts of his people, by abating from magnificence what is due to necessity.... The abridgment of useless and unnecessary expense can be no abatement of royalty. Magnificence and grandeur are not inconsistent with retrenchment and economy, but, on the contrary, in a time of necessity and of common exertion, solid grandeur is dependent on the reduction of expense; and it is the general sentiment and observation of the House that economy is at this hour essentially necessary to national salvation.

He next ventured on an argument scarcely consistent with the assumption of the royal graciousness and generosity touched on in his first period by asserting that the most important object of the bill was

The reduction of the influence of the Crown--that influence which the last Parliament, by an express resolution, had declared to be increasing, and that it ought to be diminished--an influence which was more to be dreaded, because more secret in its attacks, and more concealed in its operations than the power of prerogative.

After referring briefly to this delicate subject, he held up to scorn those who ridiculed the proposal on the ground that it would effect a saving of only £200,000 a year; as if the calamities of the present crisis were too great to be benefited by economy: as if, when millions were being spent, there was no need to think of thousands! Finally he declared that the Civil List had been granted by Parliament to His Majesty, not for his personal gratification, but in order

to support the power and the interests of the Empire, to maintain its grandeur, and pay the judges and the foreign ministers, and to maintain justice.... The people, who granted that revenue, under the circumstances of the occasion, were justified in resuming a part of it under the pressing demand of an altered situation. They clearly felt their right; but they exercised it with pain and regret. They approached the throne with hearts afflicted at the necessity of applying for retrenchment of the royal gratifications; but the request was at once loyal and submissive. It was justified by policy, and His Majesty’s compliance with the request was inculcated by prudence as well as by affection.[100]

Admiration of the perfect manner in which the speech was delivered seems to have blinded contemporaries to its importance as a political pronouncement. Certainly in both respects it is remarkable. No speech ever won more general and more immediate praise. Burke declared the young orator to be not merely a chip of the old block but the old block itself. Charles James Fox hurried up to offer his congratulations on this oratorical triumph, and further showed his regard by proposing Pitt as a member of Brooks’s club--a connection which he maintained unbroken through life. Lord North described the oration as the best first speech that he had ever heard; and another member of the House, Storer, commenting on the self-possession of the young speaker, which was far removed from “improper assurance,” remarked that there was not a word or a look that one would have wished to correct.[101] In an age when dignity of diction and grace of deportment were deemed essential to the success of a speech--that was the time when Windham used to spend hours beforehand in framing elegant juncturae for his periods--the verdicts quoted above imply in a young speaker the possession of a profusion of gifts and graces no less remarkable than the maturity of judgment which harmonized them.

Alas, the reader of to-day cannot fully realize the witchery of his diction, instinct with the fervour of youth, but balanced by the sagacity of manhood. The printed word can never reveal the nature of the spell cast on listeners by a noble countenance, harmonious gestures, musical cadences, and the free outpouring of inspiring thoughts. No great speeches, except those of a pre-eminently literary quality, such as shines in the stately rhetoric of Burke, can be appreciated apart from the speakers. It is the man who gives life to the words. A fervent admirer of Chatham’s oratory summed up his chief impression in the suggestive remark that there was something in the speaker finer than his words; “that the man was infinitely greater than the orator.” This must be so, if the speaker is to keep attention on tip-toe, ever on the look-out for new effects and charms. Hope is a necessary element in all admiration. The hearer, to be enthralled, must have been wafted up to that state of ecstasy wherein delight at present beauties is intensified by the expectation of other charms yet to come. Shakespeare has once for all time portrayed this mental bliss in the young and eager love of Florizel for Perdita:

What you do Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, I’ld have you do it ever.

Some such wealth of gifts the Commons of Britain discerned in Pitt in that springtide of hope. Theirs was to be a rich harvest of joy. Ours is but a lean aftermath.

The reader, who naturally thinks more about the matter of this speech than the manner of its delivery, will be most impressed by the boldness of some of the arguments. That a new member should venture to remind Parliament and the nation of the King’s control over the Civil List being that of a steward, not of a proprietor, was daring enough; but it is startling to find the future champion of the Crown asserting that the nation could resume at least a part of what it had granted. There is no essential difference between this plea and the dictum of Rousseau (used so effectively by the French Revolutionists against the King and the Church) that the hypothetical contract once framed between prince and people empowered the latter at any time to enter into possession of property which was held merely in trust on their behalf. The sentiments expressed in Pitt’s first speech enable us to gauge the astonishment of the world when the young orator at the close of 1783 became first Minister of the Crown.

His second speech, delivered on 31st May, was perhaps less effective than the first, though it marks an advance in argumentative power and the handling of details. Colonel Barré had proposed that the commissioners who supervised the public accounts should be chosen from the House of Commons. After a hostile speech from Lord North, Pitt rose to support the motion. He pointed out how essential this proposal was for the maintenance of the power of the Commons. He continued thus:

Every branch of the legislature has something peculiar to distinguish and to characterize it; and that which at once gives the character and elevation of the Commons House of Parliament is that they hold the strings of the national purse, and are entrusted with the great important power, first of granting the money, and then of correcting the expenditure. To delegate this right, then, is a violation of what gives them their chief consequence in the legislature, and what, above all other privileges, they cannot surrender or delegate without a violent breach of the constitution.

Tracking the Prime Minister into detail after detail, he finally begged the House to pass the motion as necessary for the prosperity of the land and as a pledge of further reforms.

But (said he) if the motion is rejected, and the old and vicious system of government is in every point tenaciously adhered to, the freedom of the people and the independence of this House must be buried in the same grave with the power, the opulence and the glory of the Empire.

Men so diverse in character as George Selwyn and the young reformer, Wilberforce, were loud in praise of the speech. The latter, though he regretfully voted against Pitt, declared him to be “a ready-made orator”; while the old place-hunter and roué found in it, “du sel et du piquant à pleines mains. Charles [Fox] en fut enchanté.”[102] Horace Walpole praised the speech in these terms:

The young William Pitt has again displayed paternal oratory. The other day, on the commission of accounts, he answered Lord North, and tore him limb from limb. If Charles Fox could feel, one should think such a rival, with an unspotted character, would rouse him. What if a Pitt and Fox should again be rivals.... As young Pitt is modest too, one would hope some genuine English may revive.

So far as we know, not a single vote was gained by this oration, for the division list showed ninety-eight against Barré’s motion and only forty-two for it. A Scottish member, Ferguson of Pitfour, a faithful supporter of Henry Dundas, on one occasion confessed that he had only once ventured to vote on his own conviction, and that was the worst vote he ever gave. Many members, while lacking the courage and wit to make the admission, acted with equal fidelity to their own interests; and hence even the best speeches rarely won over votes. In the present case no one answered, and no one could answer, Pitt’s arguments; yet they had no effect on the docile flock which trooped into the lobby at the heels of Lord North. By a majority of forty-three the Commons decided that the King should not be requested to show his benevolence and disinterestedness.

The third effort of the young orator had no more effect. It came about, apparently without premeditation, in the course of a debate on the motion of Fox for the conclusion of an immediate peace with our American colonies (12th June). In the first part of his speech Pitt warmly controverted two members who claimed that Chatham had sympathized with the war; and, in his eagerness to clear his father’s memory, he averred that his (Chatham’s) conduct on this subject had been uniform and consistent. After this doubtful assertion he stated his own views in a most trenchant style. Falling upon Lord Westcote, who had declared the war to be a holy war, he uttered these remarkable words:

I am persuaded, and will affirm, that it is a most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust, and diabolical war. It was conceived in injustice; it was nurtured and brought forth in folly;[103] its footsteps are marked with blood, slaughter, persecution and devastation; in truth everything which goes to constitute moral depravity and human turpitude are to be found in it. It is pregnant with misery of every kind. The mischiefs, however, recoil on the unhappy people of this country, who are made the instruments by which the wicked purposes of its authors are effected.

He continued in the same vehement strain, and seems to have impressed the House less than before, Selwyn giving as his verdict that he was “a promising young man.” The speech does, indeed, sound somewhat forced; and its declamation seems too turgid to be effective. On this occasion “the King’s cause” once more triumphed, by 172 votes to 99.

* * * * *

In the middle of July, after the close of the session, Pitt went on the western circuit, but the notices of his speeches are very meagre. The only reference that I have found to this episode in his life is in a letter of 29th August 1781 to his Cambridge friend, Meeke:

I have this circuit amassed the immense sum of thirty guineas without the least expense either of sense or knowledge.... I shall return to town with the fullest intention of devoting myself to Westminster Hall and getting as much money as I can, notwithstanding such avocations as the House of Commons, and (which is a much more dangerous one) Goostree’s itself. Adieu.

As a proof that Pitt did not merely play with the legal profession, I may quote this sentence from his letter of June 1782 to Meeke:

I have for many reasons chosen to be only a friend, without being a member, of Shelburne’s Administration, and am at least as likely to continue a lawyer as you are to commence one.[104]

The second letter belongs to a time when the prospects of advancement were unpromising, and when, therefore, Pitt devoted much of his time to the select and charming club at Goostree’s. As there is a widespread impression that he was a political automaton, who never unbent save under the spell of Bacchus, it will be well to turn our attention to his social life in London and at Wimbledon. It cannot be said that he ever felt the full charm of London--

The quick forge and working-house of thought.

Brought up in the aristocratic seclusion of Hayes and Burton Pynsent, and in Pretyman’s prim coterie at Cambridge, he had no experience of the varied jostling life which the Londoner loves: and nature had not dowered him with the adaptability that makes up for the defects of training. Therefore he ever remained somewhat of a stranger in London. He was at home in Downing Street, and still more so in his own select club, or at Hayes, Wimbledon, or Holwood; but London never laid her spell on him, and his life was the poorer for it. He reminds us somewhat of that character in Dickens’s “Great Expectations,” who, though naive and jovial, when he entered his suburban retreat in Walworth Road and the mimic castle at the end of the garden, yet always fixed his features in chilling reserve when he went forth citywards. So, too, there were two Pitts, the austere man of affairs, and the lovable, delightful friend. London alone could have mixed up the two men and produced a sociable compound; but this was not to be.

Lincoln’s Inn and the law did little towards unbending him; though the story, recounted in the previous chapter, of his intellectual duel with Gibbon at a dinner in Lincoln’s Inn during the Gordon Riots shows that even then he had the power of keen and witty repartee which gained him the victory over an admitted autocrat of the table. Why these gifts did not draw him into general society is hard to say. Probably his shyness and awkwardness, on which Wilberforce lays so much stress, held him aloof.

Certainly the temptations of the West End had for him only a passing allurement. He felt no desire, besides having no means, to associate with the gambling cohue that played at Brooks’s or Almack’s. His preference for bright and entertaining talkers naturally linked him with those who had sufficient mental resources within themselves to scorn the usually dull cliques whose interest in life begins and ends with card tables. So far as opportunities had offered at Cambridge, he had cultivated conversation as a fine art; and now in the West End he found several of his University friends who welcomed him to a somewhat wider circle. It included about twenty-five young men, of whom the most noteworthy were Lords Althorpe, Apsley, G. Cavendish, Duncannon, Euston, Graham, and Lennox; as well as the following who were to become peers: Mr. Pratt (Marquis Camden), St. John (Lord St. John), Bridgeman (Lord Bradford), Morris Robinson (Lord Rokeby), W. Grenville (Lord Grenville), Pepper Arden (Lord Alvanley), and R. Smith (Lord Carrington).

That was the age when the bestowal of titles was one of the means of influence used by the Crown for the defence of its prerogatives. Wilberforce late in life remarked that more than half of the Peers had received their titles during his lifetime, and certainly, if we look at the circle of Pitt’s friends in 1781, we find that only he and seven others remained commoners. They were Bankes, Edwards (afterwards Sir Gerard Noel), Marsham, T. Steele, General Smith, Wilberforce and Windham, a friend of somewhat later date.

These and a few others, about thirty in all, formed what might be termed Pitt’s Club. They met first at a house in Pall Mall, but afterwards occupied rooms in the premises of a man named Goostree, which later on were used as the Shakespeare Gallery.[105] Opposition to Lord North’s Ministry was one of the shibboleths of this coterie; but in pre-revolutionary days, when the merely political club was almost unknown, conviviality held the first place at Goostree’s. One who was in George Selwyn’s set evidently thought the ideals aimed at in Pitt’s little society too good for London; for he wrote, at the close of 1781: “Goostree’s is a small society of young men in Opposition, and they are very nice in their admissions; as they discourage gaming as much as possible, their club will not do any harm to Brooks’s, and probably not subsist a great while.” In February 1782 Selwyn himself refers to Pitt as having formed a “society of young ministers who are to fight under his banner ... and they assemble at Goostree’s.” Clearly, then, this club was political, at least in part. Pitt spent much of his time there, supping at the club every night during the winter of 1780–81; and there it was that he became intimate with William Wilberforce, the most fascinating of his friends.

The young and brilliant member for Hull was a living proof of the triumph which mind can win over physical disadvantages. In person he was slight and bent, and he early suffered from that weakness of the eyes which hampered him through life. Yet, “bodkin” though he was, his quickness of mind, the silvery tones of his voice, the wit that sparkled in his speech, and his uniform geniality and kindliness gained for him a continuous round of social triumphs. His singing possessed a natural charm which drew from the Prince of Wales the statement that he would come at any time to hear Wilberforce sing. Equally attractive was his power of mimicking any public character; but what most of all endeared him to his friends was the genial raillery of his conversation, his power of lively repartee, and the chivalry which shone in all his words and deeds. Mme de Staël afterwards declared him to be the best talker among all the Englishmen she had known; and in that art of the salons the exuberant Genevese was an exacting connoisseur. She, however, could not know the warmth of feeling which animated that slight frame, or the sensitiveness of conscience which was to make him one of the chief uplifting forces of the age. Towards the close of his life he expressed regret that in his youth he had made intellectual conversation his all in all.[106] But regret was surely needless, when that gift attracted to him the young statesman whose life at some points he helped to inspire and elevate. Both of them, indeed, were artists in words; and the free play of mind on mind must have helped to strengthen those oratorical powers which were to be devoted to the service of their country and of mankind.

From the pages of Wilberforce’s diary we catch a glimpse, tantalizingly brief, alas, of Pitt as a boon companion, losing among his intimates that shyness which outsiders mistook for pride.

He was the wittiest man I ever knew, and what was quite peculiar to himself, had at all times his wit under entire control. Others appeared struck by the unwonted association of brilliant images; but every possible combination of ideas seemed always present to his mind, and he could at once produce whatever he desired. I was one of those who met to spend an evening in memory of Shakespeare at the Boar’s Head, East Cheap. Many professed wits were present, but Pitt was the most amusing of the party, and the readiest and most apt in the required allusions. He entered with the same energy into all our different amusements; we played a good deal at Goostree’s, and I well remember the intense earnestness that he displayed when joining in these games of chance. He perceived their increasing fascination, and soon after suddenly abandoned them for ever.

This passage, together with its context, is interesting in more ways than one. Firstly it shows that the fashionable vice of the age had crept into Goostree’s more than was known by outsiders; or else Selwyn’s reference to the club belonged to a later period, when Pitt’s resolve to have done with gambling, and the remorse of Wilberforce at having suddenly won a large sum from impecunious friends, had availed to curb the passion for it in their society. The difference of the two friends in temperament is equally noteworthy. In Wilberforce the resolve to break away from gambling was the first sign of awakening of a sensitive conscience, which, though dulled by gaieties, was thenceforth to assert itself more and more and finally to win over the whole of his energies.

Pitt also felt the fascination of play in a manner which shows the eagerness of his animal instincts; but the awakening in his case seems to have been due to self-respect and also to a keen sense of what he owed to the State. How could he, who had early vowed himself to the service of his country, dull his powers and tarnish his name by indulgence in an insidious and enslaving vice? The career of Charles James Fox, we may believe, had already been a warning to the young aspirant. In any case, by an exercise of that imperious will, which controlled even his vehement impulses, he crushed at once and for ever those entangling desires, and came forth fancy-free from that Circean domain, saved by his ennobling resolve to serve England.

In another sense--a less important one, it is true--Pitt was the most unfortunate man of his age. All his friends agreed that he was a delightful talker and the most charming of companions. But there their information ends. Not one of them had the Boswellian love of detail which enables us to peer right into the heart of Johnson, and discern the loves and hates, the prejudices and envyings, the whims and fancies which swayed it. A man can never be known unless we have, not merely his great speeches, but also his small talk. That of Pitt must have been of singular charm, not only from the richness of his mental gifts, but also from the width of the culture which informed them. In learning he equalled the best of his compeers at Cambridge; and we may imagine that his vivid knowledge of the life of Greece and Rome lent to his comparisons and references a grace which could be appreciated by few raconteurs of to-day. I have already referred to the stories circulated by those who set themselves to talk and write him down to their own level, that he studied the classics merely in order to provide elegant tags to his speeches. The theme has been embroidered by certain admirers of Fox, who picture the Whig statesman as the disinterested lover of Greece and Rome, and Pitt as a kind of money-grubbing paramour. If these persons, instead of copying from the many malicious stories of that time, would investigate for themselves, they would see through the partisan spitefulness of all such tales. Fortunately, Pitt’s copies of the classics preserved at Orwell Park reveal signs, not only of his frequent perusal of them, but of the pleasure which it brought, as evinced by marginal comments. Away, then, with the Foxite myth of the classical tags!

The passage from Wilberforce’s Diary cited above also shows Pitt to have been well primed with Shakespearean lore, and to have had the mental agility and tact which could cull the right flower from that rich garner. Ill though we could spare any of Pitt’s oratorical efforts, I doubt whether we would not give up any one of his speeches if we could have in return a full record of some of the evenings spent by him and his friends at Goostree’s or the Boar’s Head.

Concerning his ordinary talk we only know that he delighted his family by his gaiety, even amidst the heaviest cares of state. In that terrible year 1793, when England and France had closed in the death grapple, Lady Chatham refers to his “ease and gay spirits”; and she speaks of him as not looking like a man on whom rested the destinies of kingdoms. A further sentence explains the source of this buoyancy of spirits: “The uprightness of his intentions and the strength of his mind saved him from feeling any oppression from the weight upon him.”[107]

Here we see the secret of that cheerfulness which charmed his friends. His high spirits were in part, no doubt, bequeathed to him by the ever confident Chatham; but their even flow was also the outcome of his own conscious rectitude. Hence also there came the brightness and sincerity which shone in Pitt’s conversation as also in his life. Another characteristic on which Wilberforce insisted was his strict truthfulness, which his friend attributed to his self-respect and to the moral purity of his nature. Yet there was no taint of priggishness about it. Wilberforce describes him as “remarkably cheerful and pleasant, full of wit and playfulness, neither, like Mr. Fox, fond of arguing a question, nor yet holding forth like some others [Windham is here hinted at]. He was always ready to hear others as well as to talk himself.”[108]

Obviously, then, Pitt’s conversation was free from some of the defects which mar the efforts of professional talkers. He never used the sledge-hammer methods by which Dr. Johnson too often won an unfair advantage; he scorned to make use of feigned incidents or grossly exaggerated accounts whereby many small wits gain a passing repute. His speech, in private as in public, seems to have resembled a limpid stream, the natural overflow of a mind richly stocked and a nature at once lively and affectionate.

Sometimes the stream raced and danced along, as appears from an entry in the diary of George Selwyn, in March 1782:

When I left the House, I left in one room a party of young men, who made me, from their life and spirits, wish for one night to be twenty. There was a tablefull of them drinking--young Pitt, Lord Euston, Berkley, North, etc., singing and laughing à gorge déployée: some of them sang very good catches; one Wilberforce, a M. of P., sang the best.

This is only one of many signs that nature had bestowed on Pitt social gifts and graces which under more favourable conditions would have made him the centre of a devoted circle of friends. True, he was too shy and modest to figure as a political Dr. Johnson; too natural to pose as did the literary lion of Strawberry Hill; too prudent to vie with Fox as the chief wit and gamester of a great club. But in his own way and in his own sphere he might have carried on those honourable traditions which have invested the life of St. Stephen’s with literary and social charm, had not Chatham’s premature forcing of his powers devitalized him before the start of a singularly early and exacting career. Here was the ill fortune of Pitt. Like all precocious natures he needed times of rest and recuperation before he reached his prime. He sought them in vain either at Hayes, Cambridge, or Westminster. As we shall see, the very unusual state of English politics down to 1789 would have made the accession of Fox, the unofficial representative of the Prince of Wales, a public misfortune; and soon afterwards there occurred in quick succession the disputes with Spain, Russia, and France, which, after two false alarms, ended in a tremendous war. In such a period how could a delicate man rise to the height of his faculties, either political or social? On both sides of his nature Pitt showed signs of the most brilliant promise; but the premature and incessant strain of public duty robbed him and his country of the full fruition.

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