Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Superscripts
are represented by ^x and ^{xx}. Additional notes will be found near
the end of this ebook.
WILLIAM PITT
AND
NATIONAL REVIVAL
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
_Fifth Edition. With many Maps and Plans and numerous
Illustrations from contemporary paintings, rare prints
and engravings, medals, etc._
_In Two Volumes, Large Post 8vo. 18s. net._
_Also a Cheaper Edition, without the Illustrations, 2 vols. 10s. net._
THE LIFE OF NAPOLEON I
INCLUDING NEW MATERIALS FROM THE BRITISH
OFFICIAL RECORDS
_Second Edition, revised. Post 8vo. 5s. net._
NAPOLEONIC STUDIES
LONDON: G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
[Illustration:
_Emery Walker Ph. sc._
_William Pitt
as Chancellor of the Exchequer
from a painting by T. Gainsborough_
]
WILLIAM PITT
AND
NATIONAL REVIVAL
BY
J. HOLLAND ROSE, LITT.D.
A rarer spirit never
Did steer humanity; but you, gods, will give us
Some faults to make us men.
SHAKESPEARE, _Antony and Cleopatra_.
[Illustration]
LONDON
G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
1911
CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
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.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
I. EARLY YEARS 34
II. AT CAMBRIDGE 50
III. POLITICAL APPRENTICESHIP 63
IV. AT WESTMINSTER AND GOOSTREE’S 76
V. THE PEACE WITH AMERICA 97
VI. THE COALITION 124
VII. THE STRUGGLE WITH FOX 152
VIII. RETRENCHMENT 178
IX. REFORM 196
X. INDIA 216
XI. THE IRISH PROBLEM (1785) 241
XII. PITT AND HIS FRIENDS (1783–94) 267
XIII. ISOLATION (1784, 1785) 296
XIV. L’ENTENTE CORDIALE (1786) 321
XV. THE DUTCH CRISIS (1786, 1787) 349
XVI. THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE 368
XVII. THE PRINCE OF WALES 391
XVIII. THE REGENCY CRISIS 406
XIX. AUSTRALIA AND CANADA 432
XX. THE SLAVE TRADE 454
XXI. THE SCHEMES OF CATHARINE II 480
XXII. PARTITION OR PACIFICATION? 503
XXIII. PARTITION OR PACIFICATION? (CONTINUED) 518
XXIV. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 537
XXV. THE DISPUTE WITH SPAIN 562
XXVI. PITT AND CATHARINE II 589
XXVII. THE TRIUMPH OF CATHARINE II 608
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
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
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.
CHAPTER 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]
[Illustration:
_Emery Walker Ph. sc._
_Hester Grenville, Countess of Chatham_
_from a painting in the possession of E. G. Pretyman Esq._
]
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.