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CHATHAM
HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS
CHATHAM
His Early Life and Connections
BY
LORD ROSEBERY
LONDON
ARTHUR L. HUMPHREYS
187 PICCADILLY, W
1910
Second Impression.
_To_
BEVILL FORTESCUE
OF DROPMORE AND BOCONNOC,
THIS BOOK, WHICH OWES EVERYTHING TO HIM,
IS
GRATEFULLY DEDICATED.
PREFACE
My first words of preface must be of excuse for some apparent lack of
gratitude in my dedication. For besides my debt to Mr. Fortescue, I owe
my warmest acknowledgments to Mary, Lady Ilchester, and her son, for the
permission to examine some of the papers of Henry Fox; a character of
great interest, whose life is yet to be written. But I hope that this
will soon be presented by Lord Ilchester, whose capacity for such work
is already proved. I render my sincere thanks both to him and to his
mother; but my dedication, written long before I had access to the
Holland House papers, must remain unchanged; for without Mr. Fortescue's
family collection of papers at Dropmore this book could never have been
begun.
The life of Chatham is extremely difficult to write, and, strictly
speaking, never can be written at all. It is difficult because of the
artificial atmosphere in which he thought it well to envelop himself,
and because the rare glimpses which are obtainable of the real man
reveal a nature so complex, so violent, and so repressed. What is this
strange career?
Born of a turbulent stock, he is crippled by gout at Eton and Oxford,
then launched into a cavalry regiment, and then into Parliament. For
eight years he is groom-in-waiting to a prince. Then he holds
subordinate office for nine years more. Then he suddenly flashes out,
not as a royal attendant or a minor placeman, but as the people's
darling and the champion of the country. In obscure positions he has
become the first man in Britain, which he now rules absolutely for four
years in a continual blaze of triumph. Then he is sacrificed to an
intrigue, but remains the supreme statesman of his country for five
years more. Then he becomes Prime Minister amid general acclamation; but
in an instant he shatters his own power, and retires, distempered if not
mad, into a cell. At last he divests himself of office, and recovers his
reason; he lives for nine years more, a lonely, sublime figure, but
awful to the last, an incalculable force. He dies, practically, in
public, as he would have wished; and the nation, hoping against hope,
pins its faith in him to the hour of death.
And for most of the time his associations are ignoble, if not
humiliating. He had to herd with political jobbers; he has to serve
intriguing kinsfolk; he had to cringe to unworthy Kings and the
mistresses of Kings; he is flouted and insulted by a puppet whig like
Rockingham. Despite all this he bequeaths the most illustrious name in
our political history; and it is the arduous task of his biographer to
show how these circumstances led to this result.
Happily this task does not fall to the present writer, who has only to
describe the struggle and the ascent; the consummation and glory of the
career lie beyond these limits.
Further, it may be said that not merely is the complete life of Chatham
difficult to write, but impossible. It is safe, indeed, to assert that
it never has been written and never can be written.
This seems a hard saying, for it appears to be a reflection on his
numerous biographers from Thackeray to Von Ruville, though it is nothing
of the sort. The fact is that the materials do not exist. For the first
time the Dropmore papers throw some light on the earlier part of his
life. But it is tolerably certain that nothing of this kind exists to
illuminate his later years. Of his conversations, of his private life
nothing, or little more than nothing, remains. Except on the one genial
occasion on which Burke saw him tooling a jim-whiskey down to Stowe, we
scarcely see a human touch. After his accession to office in 1756, his
letters of pompous and sometimes abject circumlocution, intended partly
to deceive his correspondent and partly to baffle the authorities of the
Post Office, give no clue to his mind. He wrote an ordinary note as
Rogers wrote an ordinary couplet. Even his love-letters are incurably
stilted. There is no ease, no frankness, no self-revelation in anything
that he wrote after he embarked actively in politics. From that time he
shrouded himself carefully and successfully from his contemporaries,
except on the occasions when he appeared in public; for, strange to say,
it was in his speeches that his nature sometimes burst forth. And yet
even here, there is trouble. One of the difficulties of a life of
Chatham lies in the rough notes of his speeches preserved by Horace
Walpole. They are often confused, often dreary, sometimes
incomprehensible; but they must be included, for there is nothing else;
though they weigh heavy on a book. Sometimes, however, they reveal a
flash of the man, and Pitt permits little else. Such being his
deliberate scheme of life, adopted partly from policy, partly from
considerations of health, there seems little more material for a
biography of the man, apart from his public career, than exists in the
case of a Trappist.
It is then, I think, safe to predict that the real life of Chatham can
never be written, as the intimate facts are wanting. What survive were,
as usual, exhausted by Macaulay in those two brilliant essays, in which
with the sure grasp of historical imagination he depicted the glowing
scenes of Chatham's career, and left to posterity the portrait which
will never be superseded. For his instinct supplies the lack of
evidence, and though there may be exaggeration of praise, that praise
will not be seriously diminished. Lives of Chatham will always be
written, because few subjects are more interesting or more dramatic, but
they must always be imperfect. It is, of course, easy to record his
course as a statesman, his speeches, his triumphs, his achievements; and
these narratives will be called biographies. But will they ever reveal
the real man?
There seems to be a constant tendency in writers to forget that the
provinces of history and biography, though they often overlap, are
essentially distinct; for history records the life of nations, and
biography the life of individuals. To set forth the annals of the time
in which the hero has existed, and to note his contact with them, is
only a part of his life, though it is often held to be all that is worth
remembering. The life of any man that ever lived on earth is far more
than his public career. The life of a man is not his public life, which
is always alloyed with some necessary diplomacy and which is sometimes
only a mask; it is made up of a thousand touches, a multitude of lights
and shadows, most of which are invisible behind the austere presentment
of statecraft. We have probably all, and perhaps more than all, that
Shakespeare ever wrote; we have so to speak all his public life. But
would we not gladly give one or two of his plays to obtain some true
insight into his private life, to realise the humanity of this
superhuman being, to know how this immortal was linked to mortality? We
want to know how a master man talked, and, if possible, what he thought;
what was his standpoint with regard to the grave issues of life; what he
was in his hours of ease, what he enjoyed, how he unbent; in a word,
what he was without his wig and bag and sword, in his dressing-gown and
slippers, with a friend, a novel, or a pipe. This is half or three parts
of a man, and it is certain that we shall never know this aspect of
Chatham. He would no doubt, had it served his purpose, have appeared in
the dressing-gown and slippers, but the array would have been as solemn
and artificial as the robes of a cardinal. He would, had it served his
purpose, have smoked a pipe, but it would have been the jewelled
nargileh of the Grand Mogul. He had practically no intimates; his wife
told nothing, his children told nothing; he revealed himself neither by
word nor on paper, he deliberately enveloped himself in an opaque fog of
mystery; and there seems no clue or channel by which any further detail
of his character can reach us, unless Addington, the doctor, or Wilson,
the tutor, have anything to tell us. But did anything of the kind
survive, we feel confident that it would have transpired. Beckford and
Potter, Barre and Camden, his friends or sycophants or satellites, have
left no sign. Shelburne indeed thinks that he penetrated Chatham, and
Shelburne no doubt saw him under circumstances of comparative intimacy.
And yet, judging by the result, it may well be doubted whether Shelburne
did more than watch and guess, with an inkling of spite. Occasionally
there is a legend, a tradition, or an anecdote, but Chatham seems to
have cut off all vestiges of his real self as completely as a
successful fugitive from justice. And so posterity sees nothing but the
stern effigy representing what he wished, or permitted, or authorised to
be seen. This is not enough or nearly enough, but it must now be certain
that there will never be much more. This makes us all the more grateful
for the Dropmore papers and for Mr. Fortescue's liberality. He has been
able to throw new light on Chatham's youth and on his unrestrained days.
Light on the subsequent years of self-repression would be so guarded and
shaded that we should scarce obtain a glimpse of the true man. Indeed,
by his careful disguise Chatham has made himself a prehistoric or rather
a prebiographical figure, a man of the fifteenth century or earlier. We
know what was around him, the scene on which he played, the other actors
in the great drama, and we recognise himself on the stage; but away from
the footlights he remains in darkness. In a word, after 1756, when this
book ends, his public life is conspicuous and familiar. But his inner
life after that period will never be known; and so we must be content
with a torso.
_October 1910._
It has seemed unnecessary to give references to familiar printed
authorities, such as Horace Walpole, Coxe, Harris's Life of
Hardwicke, Waldegrave, or the published Dropmore MSS. But where an
exception has been deemed necessary, 'Orford' refers to the
'Memoirs,' and 'Walpole' denotes an allusion to the 'Letters.'
Lord Camelford's manuscript, which I have used so copiously, is an
intimate family document entitled 'Family Characters and Anecdotes,'
addressed to his son, and dated 1781.
CHATHAM
HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS
CHAPTER I.
There is one initial part of a biography which is skipped by every
judicious reader; that in which the pedigree of the hero is set forth,
often with warm fancy, and sometimes at intolerable length. It is,
happily, not necessary to enter upon the bewildering branches of the
innumerable Pitts, but only to keep to one conspicuous stem. We must
however record that the Pitt family was gentle and honourable; 'it had,'
says one of them, 'been near two centuries growing into wealth without
producing anything illustrious.'[1] But in the eighteenth century it was
destined to blossom into no less than four peerages, Londonderry,
Rivers, Camelford, and Chatham, not one of which survives. William
Pitt's great-grandfather was Vicar of Blandford in Dorsetshire; and
there was born Thomas, his grandfather, better known as Governor Pitt,
and associated in history with the famous Pitt diamond. The Vicar, being
the younger son of a younger son, had no fortune but the advowson of his
own living of St. Mary; and Thomas again being a younger son set forth
to seek his fortunes in the Golden East, and, it may be added, found
them there.
Of this redoubtable progenitor, Governor Pitt, as he was always called,
it would be possible to say much, as his life, measured by the length of
current biographies, would justify a volume; in any case it is necessary
to say something, for in his character may be traced some germs of his
grandson's intractable qualities.
We first catch sight of him as an 'interloper,' that is, an illicit
merchant carrying on trade in violation of the East India Company's
monopoly. In that capacity he showed himself formidable and intrepid,
'of a haughty, huffying, daring temper,'[2] and the Company waged
unsparing war against him. In a letter to their agents, writing with
special reference to him, they say: 'We have a most acceptable accompt
of the flourishing condition of all our affaires in those parts, and of
the wreck and disappointment of all the interlopers; insomuch that if
you have done your parts in reference to the _Crowne_, that Tho. Pitts
went upon, there is no probability (that) of seven interloping ships
that went to India the same year that our Agent did, any one ship will
ever come to England again; and ... we cannot doubt that you will in due
time render us as pleasing an accompt of those interlopers that went out
this year, which will certainly put an end to that kind of robbery.'[3]
And so these hostilities continued for more than a score of years, but
without the suppression of Pitt, who appears to have greatly thriven in
the process; for during the latter part of this period he was member of
Parliament for his own pocket borough of Old Sarum,[4] bought out of
these contraband gains. Victory, indeed, rested with him; for the
Company, weary and baffled, determined, on the faith of an ancient but
precarious principle, to set a thief to catch a thief; and in November
1697 appointed Pitt governor of Fort St. George, though some fastidious
stockholders protested. This 'roughling immoral man,' as one of the
objectors called him, governed with a high and strong hand from 1698 to
1709; when the Company, finding the burden of him intolerable, summarily
dismissed him. He was, no doubt, like his grandson, a difficult servant;
and in his career we see the source of that energy, haughtiness, and
self-reliance which were so conspicuous in both. Lord Camelford, his
great-grandson, though a relentless critic of his family, gives, in the
grateful character of an heir, a leniently appreciative account of the
Governor; and says that 'he amassed a fortune which was reckoned
prodigious in those times without the smallest stain on his reputation.
I have heard (but at what exact period of his life I know not) that,
having accomplished such a sum as he thought would enable him to pass
the remainder of his days in peace, he was taken prisoner, together with
the greatest part of his effects, on his return to England, and released
at the intercession of the Duchess of Portsmouth, who was then in
France. He went back to India and made in a shorter time a much larger
fortune from the credit he had established and the experience he had
acquired.'
[Sidenote: 1710]
However that may be, he now returned promptly to England, by way of
Bergen, having shipped on a Danish vessel, and having sent before him in
the heel of his son's shoe[5] the precious chattel which made his name
famous, until, under his descendants, it acquired a different lustre.
This was a prodigious diamond, to which he alludes in his correspondence
as his 'grand concern,' which he bought for 48,000_l._, and sold, after
keeping it for some sixteen years, to the Regent of Orleans for the
French Crown. It was rather a sonorous than a profitable bargain, for
though he sold it for 133,000_l._, he was never paid in full. He
received 40,000_l._ and three boxes of jewels, but the balance,
calculated at 20,000_l._, was never discharged. He and his descendants
reckoned, indeed, that on the whole he was the poorer by the possession
of this gem. A tradition remains that the bargain might have fallen
through at the last moment but for the shrewdness of the Governor's
second son, Lord Londonderry. When Rondet, the royal jeweller, came from
Paris to receive it, he criticised the water of the stone. 'His
lordship, who was quick enough in business, understood him, and putting
a bank-note into his hands, bid him go to the window to see it in a
better light. It was then decided to be in all respects perfect.'[6]
It is evident, however, that he was possessed of considerable though
exaggerated wealth, and he was probably the first of those nabobs who
were to bulk so largely in the drama, the society, and the politics of
the eighteenth century. Among these his diamond gave him pre-eminence,
and made his name both famous and proverbial. In England he remained for
the rest of his life, some sixteen years, dying in 1726. The reformed
filibuster had become a power in the land. He had wealth, force of
character, political connection, and parliamentary influence. This last
must have been an object with him, as we find him sitting for Thirsk
instead of his own borough of Old Sarum; and his eldest grandson seems
to have inherited a considerable but indefinable interest in the
borough-mongering of the West, having definite powers in regard to
Okehampton and Sarum, and vaguer connections elsewhere. So the Governor,
a staunch Whig and furious anti-Jacobite, with an influential son-in-law
in Stanhope, a soldier and statesman who was First Minister for a time,
was a man to be reckoned with. He was indeed offered, and had accepted,
the Governorship of Jamaica, a high compliment, for it was then a
position of peculiar difficulty, but never took up the appointment;
finding probably his hands full at home, with an insubordinate family to
manage, capital to invest, and estates to superintend.
We find him living at Twickenham, Swallowfield, Blandford, and in Pall
Mall, but mainly at Stratford, near Old Sarum. He had indeed
contemplated building his principal residence at Blandford, his early
home. But the younger children, finding that this would be settled on
the eldest son, intercepted his purpose and turned his attention to
Swallowfield, 'where, however, he contrived to throw away as much money
in a very ugly place with no property about it,'[7] writes his resentful
heir.
Finally, in 1726, the Governor was gathered to his fathers, and his
spoils caused some disappointment. His wealth had been over-rated, as is
perhaps the case with all notorious fortunes, and not well invested; at
any rate, he had burned his fingers in the South Sea Bubble. He seems to
have left 100,000_l._ in personal property, though some of that may have
consisted in unsubstantial and unrealised advances to Lord Londonderry,
or others of his children. He had bought land wherever he could find it
(for the sake, perhaps, of influence as much as income), in London
(Soho), Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, Devonshire, and
Cornwall, as well as that most marketable of assets, Old Sarum, and
apparently other borough interests. But his greatest acquisition was the
noble estate of Boconnoc, which he purchased in 1717 from the widow of
that wild Mohun who was slain in duel by his brother-in-law, the Duke of
Hamilton. The Governor paid 53,000_l._ for the estate, a great price in
those days; but was held to have got a bargain.[8]
To his family he had always been formidable, but also an object of
jealous rapacity and expectation. They wrangled and intrigued for his
money both during his life and afterwards, and seem to have been
universally dissatisfied by the result. 'From the various characters of
these persons' (the Governor's children) 'it is easy to conceive,'
writes Lord Camelford, 'in what manner the Governor must have been
pulled to pieces by their different passions and interests when he came
to realise his wealth in England.' The transactions with Lord
Londonderry seem to have been particularly complicated; in fact they
were never unravelled. We only gather, as a specimen of them, that after
the Governor's death his executors claimed 95,000_l._ as due from Lord
Londonderry; which Lord Londonderry denied, claiming 10,000_l._ from the
estate. Thirty years were vainly spent in the endeavour to clear up this
issue, a process rendered all the more arduous by Lord Londonderry's
having peremptorily possessed himself of his father's papers after
death. Only one case seems to have been free from complication. The
Governor stated succinctly that his son John was good for nothing, and
so he logically left him nothing. John, however, claimed an annuity
which, we may be confident, he never obtained. Thus there were endless
disputes, a civil war in the family, not uncongenial, perhaps, to those
who waged it; which died out only with the combatants, but which
illustrates once more the volcanic character of these truculent Pitts.
It is in his family relations, in his dealings with these ungracious
heirs and with his own wife, that the Governor is most vivid and
interesting; at any rate, to one who has to trace the heredity of genius
and character in his descendants. Thomas Pitt's blood came all aflame
from the East, and flowed like burning lava to his remotest descendants,
with the exception of Chatham's children; but even then it blazed up
again in Hester Stanhope. There was in it, even when it throbbed in the
veins of his eldest son and grandson, some tropical, irritant quality
which, under happy circumstances and control, might produce genius, but
which under ordinary circumstances could only evolve domestic skirmish
and friction. The Governor himself, in his dealings with his wife and
children, does not seem to have been tolerant or tolerable. He set
himself to rule them with the notions of absolutism which are associated
with the Oriental monarchies, but he met with no great measure of
success. It is necessary to study his methods as exhibiting the volcanic
source of a formidable race.
His wife was of the family of Innes in Morayshire, 'of Scotch and
Cornish extraction,' says Lord Camelford, and she was lineally descended
from the Regent Murray. Sir John Sinclair, like a loyal Scot, attributes
the genius and eloquence of the Pitts to their 'fortunate connection
... with a Miss Innes of Redhall, in the Highlands of Scotland.' Of her,
nevertheless, in unconsciousness of this obligation, but in receipt of
private advices, the Governor writes in terms of implacable hostility.
He had heard, he says to his son, 'that your mother has been guilty of
some imprudence at the Bath ... let it be what it will, in my esteem she
is noe longer my wife, nor will I see her more if I can help it.'[9]
But his children were not to be released from duty to her by her
supposed misconduct. Four years earlier he had written to Robert: 'If
what you write of your mother be true, I think she is mad, and wish she
was well secured in Bedlam; but I charge you let nothing she says or
does make you undutiful in any respect whatever.' So when they
apparently act on the Governor's view of Mrs. Pitt, he turns round and
belabours them. 'Have all of you,' he inquires of his eldest son, 'shook
hands with shame, that you regard not any of the tyes of Christianity,
humanity, consanguinity, duty, good morality, or anything that makes you
differ from beasts, but must run from one end of the kingdome to the
other, aspersing one another, and aiming at the ruine and destruction of
one another?' This genial picture of his offspring does not seem wholly
imaginary, for the Governor proceeds: 'That you should dare to doe such
an unnatural and opprobrious action as to turne your mother and sisters
out of doors?--for which I observe your frivolous reasons, and was
astonished to read them; and I no less resent what they did to your
child at Stratford. But I see your hand is against every one of them,
and every one against you, and your brother William to his last dying
minute.' (William had died young, in 1706.) A week later he writes
again: 'Not only your letters, but all I have from friends, are stuffed
with an account of the hellish confusion that is in my family; and by
what I can collect of all my letters, the vileness of your actions on
all sides are not to be paralleled in history. Did ever mother, brother,
and sisters study one another's ruine and destruction more than my
unfortunate and cursed family have done?' He again reverts to the
grievance of Robert's having turned his mother and sisters out of doors,
though he calls them, in the same letter, 'an infamous wife and
children,' and states that he has 'discarded and renounced your mother
for ever;' apparently on suspicion, for he makes 'noe distinction
between women that are reputed ill and such as are actually soe.' The
wife of the Caesar of Fort St. George had to be above suspicion. Nor is
this by any means an isolated passage. From his Eastern satrapy the
Governor pours on his hapless family, and especially on his firstborn, a
constant flood of scorn and invective. The arrival of the Indian mail
must have caused a periodical panic to his children, and his
announcement in 1715 that 'writing now is not so much my talent as
formerly' a corresponding relief.
In vain does Robert, the eldest son, inspire friends to write to the
Governor glowing accounts of his conduct; the Governor sniffs suspicion
in every breeze. 'I wish gaming bee not rife in your family, or you
could never have spent so considerable an estate in so short a time.' 'I
wish gameing, drinking, and other debaucheries has not been the bane of
you.' 'I wish these sore eyes of yours did not come by drinking, and
that generally ushers in gaming, of either of which vices or any other
dishonourable action, if I find you guilty, you may be assured I will
give you no quarter.' 'I think that no son in the world deserves more to
be discarded by a father.' But on the rare occasions when the Governor
does not write in a passion his letters are full of sound sense. The
cost of education is the only expense which he does not grudge. 'I would
also have you putt your mother in mind that she gives her daughters good
education, and not to stick at any charge for it.' But he wishes to get
his money's worth. 'See that your brothers and sisters keep close to
their studies, and let not my money be spent in vain on them; if it be,
I'll pinch 'em hereafter.' Again, later, he writes: 'When this reaches
you your brothers will be 17 years old. If their genius leads them to be
scholars, I would have them sent to Oxford, but placed in two distinct
colleges; and if inclined to study law you may enter them in the Temple.
But if they are inclined to be merchants, let them learn all languages,
and obtain perfect knowledge of the sciences bearing upon trade. I
believe that trade will flourish rather than decay.'
When he returned home things were probably not much better for his
children, though his letters, of course, are less frequent, and also
less violent. But we gather from timid and vigilant bulletins sent off
by those who cautiously approached the Governor's lair that he was still
as formidable and plain spoken as ever. He suspects Robert of
Jacobitism, the supreme sin in the judgment of the old Governor. 'It is
said you are taken up with factious caballs, and are contriving amongst
you to put a French kickshaw upon the throne again.' 'I have heard since
I came to towne,' he writes seven years afterwards, 'that you are
strooke with your old hellish acquaintance, and in all your discourse
are speaking in favour of that villainous traytor Ormond.' And again:
'Since last post I have had it reiterated to me that in all company you
are vindicating Ormonde and Bullingbrooke, the two vilest rebells that
ever were in any nation, and that you still adhere to your cursed Tory
principles, and keep those wretches company who hoped by this time to
have murthered the whole Royall family: in which catastrophe your father
was sure to fall,' &c. &c. From which it may be gathered that the moral
temperature of Pall Mall, whence the Governor was writing, differed
little from that of Madras.
The only note of tenderness that he ever strikes is with regard to his
grandson, William, to whom he looks with a rare prescience of attention.
At first he conducts both boys from Eton to Swallowfield, 'with some of
their comrogues,' on a short leave of absence. But soon it is William
alone whom he takes as a companion. 'I set out for Swallowfield Friday
next; your son, William, goes with me.' 'I observe you have sent for
your son, William, from Eton. He is a hopeful lad, and doubt not but he
will answer yours and all his friends' expectations,' 'I shall be glad
to see Will here as he goes to Eton.' 'Monday last I left Will at Eton.'
Sentences like these taken from the Governor's letters are, when the
writer is considered, a sufficient testimony of exceptional regard. It
is not too much to say that William is the only one of his descendants
whom the Governor commends; the only one, indeed, who never falls under
the lash of the Governor's uncontrollable tongue.
The Governor left behind him three sons, Robert, Thomas, and John; and
two daughters, Lucy and Essex. Robert, the eldest son, married, somewhat
clandestinely, Harriot Villiers, sister of the Earl of Grandison, 'who
seems to have brought with her,' says her grandson, 'little more than
the insolence of a noble alliance.' A more favourable estimate declares
that she had a fortune of 3000_l._, and that 'it is a great dispute
among those who have the pleasure of conversing with her whether her
beauty, understanding, or good-humour be the most captivating.' She
makes a pale apparition in Lady Suffolk's correspondence, soliciting a
place for her brother, Lord Grandison, with the offer of a bribe, and
subsiding under the royal confidant's rebuke.[10]
The second, Thomas, married one of the heiresses of Ridgeway, Earl of
Londonderry. After that nobleman's death 'he _bought_ the honours which
were extinct in the person of his wife's father.'[11] One infers from
casual hints that Thomas may have had the most influence with his
father, and that he was not embarrassed by scruples. He was, says Lord
Camelford, 'a man of no character, and of parts that were calculated
only for the knavery of business, in which he overreached others, and at
last himself.' But Camelford may have been soured by the controversies
which followed the Governor's death. The honours so dubiously acquired
died out with Lord Londonderry's two sons.
John, the Governor's third son, 'was in the army, an amiable vaurien, a
personal favourite with the King, and, indeed, with all who knew him as
a sort of Comte de Gramont, who contrived to sacrifice his health, his
honour, his fortunes to a flow of libertinism which dashed the fairest
prospect, and sank him for many years before his death in contempt and
obscurity.'[12] This death took place, within Lord Camelford's memory,
'at the thatched house by the turnpike in Hammersmith.' John seems to
have been a sort of Will Esmond, and we have on record a horse
transaction of his which savours strongly of Thackeray's famous
knave.[13] He married 'a sister of Lord Fauconberg's, whose personal
talents and accomplishments distinguished her as much at least as her
birth, and much more than her virtues.'[14]
Another of Colonel John's freaks is worth retailing, as throwing light
on the peremptory methods of the Pitts, and of the manner in which the
Governor was harried by his offspring. He waited outside his father's
house in Pall Mall on a day when he knew that one of the estate agents
was to bring up the rents of an estate. He watched the man in and out of
the house, then went in, where he found some secretary counting the
money over, swept it deftly with his sword into his hat, and escaped
into the street, full of glee at having bubbled an unappreciative parent
out of his dues, and leaving the unhappy subordinate paralysed behind
him.[15] This anecdote enables us to understand why the Governor had so
low an opinion of John, and why the keys were kept under the Governor's
bed when this scapegrace was at home.[16]
Of the two daughters, Lucy, who married the first Earl Stanhope, the
minister and general, seems to have left a fragrant memory behind her;
we are pleased to find her resenting her sister-in-law's behaviour to
her mother, the Governor's wife. She died in February 1723-4.
Essex, the second, married Charles Cholmondely, of Vale Royal,
grandfather of the first Lord Delamere. 'Her peevishness made her the
scourge of her family,' says her great-nephew, so we may conclude that
she was not devoid of the Pitt characteristics. She died in 1754.
Over his luckless heir the Governor had kept constantly suspended the
terrors of his testamentary dispositions. 'My resentments,' he wrote not
long before his death, 'against you all have been justly and honourably
grounded, and that you will find when my head is laid.' Nevertheless,
when he died in 1726, Robert, the belaboured eldest son, succeeded to
the great bulk of his fortune. He, in his turn, did not lose a moment in
visiting on his eldest son, Thomas, the sufferings that he himself had
endured. In the very letter in which he announces his father's death to
the lad, he speaks of his son's 'past slighting and disobedient conduct
towards me,' and lectures him with uncompromising severity. He does,
indeed, announce an allowance of 700_l._ a year, but soon after docks it
of 200_l._ on the flimsiest and shabbiest pretexts. Robert, who seems to
have been a poor creature, as his portrait at Boconnoc represents him,
mean and cantankerous, with some of the violence but without the vigour
and ability of the Governor, only survived his father a year, into which
he managed to concentrate a creditable average of quarrels with his
family. His death was something like the sinking of a fireship;
spluttering and scolding he disappears in 1727.
Robert's life and death were on the lines laid down by Pitt precedent.
He lived and died on ill terms with his family, and his death was
followed by the customary lawsuits. During his short possession of his
patrimony he had laboured under some miscalculation as to its extent;
for, after examining the rentals and estates, he had congratulated
himself on the possession of 'full 10,000_l._ a year;' ' in which belief
he died soon after, leaving the same delusion to his son, which was one
of the principal causes of his misfortunes.'[17] As the estate was
entailed, Thomas, Robert's eldest son, was not liable for the debts of
his father, or anxious to assume that responsibility. The claims that
gave him most trouble were those of his mother, Robert's widow, who had
obtained additions to her jointure, and had had 10,000_l._ settled on
her children at her marriage, a provision which was apparently never
carried into execution. Many bills and cross bills in Chancery were the
consequence of these claims, which ended in Mrs. Robert Pitt's
retirement into France, where she shortly afterwards died. Her brother
and champion, Lord Grandison, also retreated to Ireland, both thus
renouncing administration of the effects of Robert Pitt. So, avows Lord
Camelford, 'my father seized whatever fell into his hands without
account, either belonging to my grandfather or grandmother, keeping at
arm's length every demand upon him, till somehow or other these
litigations seem to have worn themselves out and slept by the
acquiescence of all parties.' The 'acquiescence,' we may add, seems only
to have accrued by the death of the litigants.
Robert left two sons and five daughters, and this brood was not unworthy
of the family traditions. The eldest son was Thomas, the second
William, the subject of this book; to the daughters we shall come
presently.
The volcanic element in the Pitt blood was fully manifest in this
generation, and Thomas was a child of wrath. His relations with his
younger brother William seem always to have been uneasy, and from an
early period they seem to have been wholly uncongenial to each other.
Whatever William may have been, Thomas was impracticable, and no one
seems to have succeeded in working amicably with him. He was a man of
extremes. 'All his passions,' writes his son, 'were violent by nature,
particularly pride and ambition, which were painted in his figure, one
of the most imposing I ever saw. He was not without good qualities; but,
to speak fairly, they were greatly over-balanced by the contrary
tendencies.' He was said not to have been naturally vicious, but early
embarrassments, perpetual family litigations, a sense of injury, the
flattery of dependents, and a train of mortifications and
disappointments 'had formed in him such habits of rapacity, injustice
and violence that he seemed at last to have lost even the sense of right
and wrong.' He had, evidently, personal attractions, marred by an
imperious demeanour, was strong and graceful, addicted to hunting and
manly sports, fond of music and dancing. His overbearing manner, which
arose from an undisguised contempt of his equals, gave him some
ascendancy in Cornwall, where, however, though endured, he was secretly
detested.
So haughty and violent a character might, one supposes, have been
mellowed and redeemed by a fortunate marriage, and Thomas seems to have
secured an angel as his wife. At the opera one night he saw a daughter
of Sir Thomas Lyttelton, was struck by her extraordinary beauty,
proposed in his headlong manner next day, and was accepted. Her son
laments her want of any fortune to remedy her husband's eternal
embarrassments, but she seems to have lacked nothing else. Besides her
loveliness, 'as a faithful wife, a tender mother, a kind friend, an
indulgent mistress, she was a pattern to her sex.'[18] But her very
virtues turned her husband against her. Her meek gentleness, humility,
and charity, the extreme piety, carried almost to bigotry, in which she
had been reared, were reproachful contrasts to his opposite qualities.
She was the object of ridicule to the wit and malice of others,
possibly, we should guess, of her sisters-in-law; and, finally, every
kind sentiment, even of common humanity, towards her, was extinguished
in the husband who had loved her so passionately.
Thomas seems, from the moment of succession until death, to have been a
prey to pecuniary embarrassment. He started with an exaggerated view of
his resources, and launched into extravagance; arrogance and ambition
made him more profuse; a taste for borough management, strong in him,
was probably more expensive than any other possible form of gambling; so
all his life was soured by the struggle between pride and debt, and by
consequent mortification. This seems to be the secret of his wasted and
unhappy existence.
United as he was by his marriage to the Lytteltons, Grenvilles, and
Cobham, he naturally became an adherent and favourite of the Prince of
Wales. He probably called the Prince's attention in glowing terms to the
possibilities of the Heir Apparent's Duchy of Cornwall, and, at any
rate, became His Royal Highness's parliamentary manager in the West, the
realm of rotten boroughs. There the Prince was flattered, or flattered
himself, with influence as Duke of Cornwall, in a region where Lord
Falmouth, the famous threatener of 'we are seven,' and Thomas himself
exercised a more substantial sway. He enjoyed a fleeting triumph at the
General Election of 1741, not unaccompanied with the constant quarrels
which were the vital element of his family. As a reward he was appointed
in 1742 Warden of the Stannaries.
Then he seems to decay. The General Election of 1747, on which he had
built high hopes, brought him nothing but debt and disaster. He writes
in despair to the Prince, and Frederick sends kindly and reassuring
messages in reply; but he was now ruined, and his last prospects
vanished with the Prince of Wales, on whose death he was superseded in
the Stannaries; this perhaps marks the date of his final catastrophe. At
any rate, there was a financial collapse, and he had to go abroad.
Shelburne met him at Utrecht and heard him hold forth in the true Pitt
style, abusing his brother William as a hypocrite and scoundrel, with a
great flow of language and a quantity of illustrative anecdotes. 'A bad
man,' says Horace Walpole. 'Never was ill-nature so dull as his, never
dullness so vain.'
Shelburne hints that he was mad, or nearly mad, and that, though not
actually confined, he was obliged to live a very retired life,
complicated by straitened circumstances. 'The unhappy man,' as William
calls him, had never been on cordial terms with his brother: they had
had the usual family wrangles about property, and recently, in his
distress, Thomas had solicited from William, now Secretary of State and
supreme, the appointment of Minister to the Swiss Cantons. He might have
foreseen refusal, for he was fit for no such employment, and William was
sensitive as to charges of favour to his family from the Crown. But men
are friendly judges of their own fitness for any post which they may
happen to desire, and Thomas did not care, probably, to have his merits
or demerits so justly appraised by his junior; so he spent his time of
exile in denouncing to any audience that was attracted by his name, the
ingratitude and neglect of his successful relative. He died in July
1761, and William frigidly announces to his nephew the death of 'the
unhappy man' from apoplexy.
This nephew was created Lord Camelford under the auspices of his first
cousin, the younger Pitt, whom, by the way, Pitt-like, he seems unable
to forgive for this favour, as he never mentions his creator. The
malicious bards of the Rolliad hinted that the peerage accrued from some
borough-mongering transaction:
'Say, what gave Camelford his wished for rank?
Did he devote old Sarum to the Bank?
Or did he not, that envied rank to gain,
Transfer the victim to the Treasury's fame?' (_sic_)
But, though he was by no means destitute of the family characteristics,
this Thomas was a man of high honour, character and charm. He won the
heart of Horace Walpole, whose neighbour he was, until they quarrelled,
as of course they were sure to do. But for a time Horace, whose
affection was not often or easily given and whose confidence in matters
of taste was fastidious, gave both affection and confidence unstintedly
to this young man. He attracted, too, the still rarer tenderness of his
uncle William. To him Chatham addressed the well-known letters on
education which he found time to write in all the business of office;
though Thomas on attaining manhood repaid him with the most cordial
aversion. This sentiment, which seems at first to savour of ingratitude,
is not in reality difficult to explain. In the first place, the uncle
was to some extent involved in those financial questions connected with
the paternal inheritance in which the father played, as we have seen, so
intrepid though unscrupulous a part. Mutual aversion facilitated mutual
disagreement in matters always fertile of friction; and the younger
Thomas, though he had an ill opinion of his father, sided with him as
against his uncle. We cannot, even on Thomas's own showing, blame the
uncle in these rather petty transactions, and William's besetting sin
was certainly not avarice; but neither can we blame the son for siding
with the father. On an impartial survey we may conclude that disputes
between two Pitts who were near descendants of the Governor were
incapable of an amicable solution.
But there was more than this. William, for some purpose of persuasion,
says Lord Camelford, informed Thomas that his nephew, the younger Thomas
(Lord Camelford himself), would be his heir. This was a considerable,
almost a magnificent, prospect. William was then middle-aged and
unmarried, his position and future were alike splendid, and high office
might in those days lead to wealth. His career had, moreover, brought
him a legacy of 10,000_l._ from Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. But, far
beyond that there was the reversion of the great Althorp inheritance,
between which and William there were only the lives of the short-lived
possessor and his sickly child. That William held out this expectation
we think so probable that we do not even question it. He had all his
life been half an invalid, and never seems to have contemplated marriage
till he did marry, at the age of forty-eight. He, moreover, loved his
nephew with sincere and proved tenderness. Why, then, should it be
doubted that he indicated him as his heir, when, in truth, he had no
other? But that he did this with an unworthy motive or for the purpose
of deception there is neither proof nor probability. The episode
probably furnished matter for his brother's maudlin ravings at Utrecht,
but we do not think that it materially influenced the opinions of his
nephew.
The true reason for Camelford's hatred of his uncle was that he fell
under the influence of George Grenville at a time when Grenville had
broken for ever with Pitt. The estimable qualities of Grenville have
been described with a colour and exuberance which could only proceed
from the glowing imagination of Burke. But, with all allowance for what
Burke saw in this able, narrow, and laborious person, it cannot be
denied that the foundation of his qualities was a stubborn self-esteem
which necessarily led to stubborn hatreds. Grenville came to hate Bute,
to hate the King, to hate the Duke of Cumberland; but it may be doubted
if all his other accumulated hatreds equalled that which he felt for his
brother-in-law. Pitt, while in office, had kept Grenville in a
subordinate position, and had apparently thought it adequate to his
deserts. When Grenville was Minister, Pitt had negotiated with the King
to overthrow him. In the schism produced by Pitt's resignation, Temple
had sided with Pitt and quarrelled with his brother George. But, worst
of all, Pitt had held Grenville up, not unsuccessfully, to public
ridicule and contempt. Now, a Grenville to himself was not as other men
are; he was something sacred and ineffable. Neither Temple nor George
ever doubted that they were the equals, nay, the superiors, of their
brother-in-law, whom in their hearts they regarded as only a brilliant
adventurer, useful, under careful guidance, to the Grenville scheme of
creation. When, therefore, Pitt quizzed and thwarted George, he raised
an implacable enemy. Later on, they might affect reconciliation, and
Temple might pompously announce to the world that the Brethren were
reunited. But George's undying resentment against Pitt never flagged to
the hour of his death.
Thomas Pitt came under Grenville's influence at the fiercest moment of
this rancour, and seems to have been the only person on record who was
fascinated by him. Thomas writes of him with affectionate enthusiasm
long after his death, and in his life waged his wars with zeal. One of
these led to a quarrel with Horace Walpole, arising out of the dismissal
of Conway, which produced a lengthy correspondence, still extant. But to
become the disciple of George Grenville it was necessary to abhor
William Pitt. Thomas took the test without difficulty, and adhered to it
conscientiously. His father's influence, such as it was, tended in the
same direction. So, though Thomas specifically places his uncle at the
head of all British statesmen, and although he besought Chatham to sit
to Reynolds for the gallery at Boconnoc, and though he displayed grief,
real or ostentatious, at Chatham's death, going the quaint length of
asking every one to dinner who spoke sympathetically in either House on
the occasion; in spite of all this, he retails aversion in every
sentence that he writes; aversion of which the obvious source is
devotion to Grenville. It is necessary to explain this because
Camelford's manuscript notes would otherwise be inexplicable. Putting
this violent prejudice on one side, this memorial drawn up by Camelford
for his son, though too intimate for complete publication, is a
priceless document. Let all be forgiven him for the sake of this
manuscript. It may be inaccurate, and biassed and acrid, but it presents
the family circle from within by one of themselves, and no more vivid
picture can exist of that strange cockatrice brood of Pitts.
The son for whom it was written grew up a spitfire, not less eccentric
than his sires, and became notorious as the second Lord Camelford. His
was a turbulent, rakehelly, demented existence, the theme of many
newspaper paragraphs. He revived in his person all the pranks and
outrage of the Mohawks. Bull-terriers, bludgeons, fighting of all kinds
were associated with him; riots of all kinds were as the breath of his
nostrils, more especially theatrical tumults. One of these latter
contests brought him into contact with the pacific authors of the
'Rejected Addresses,' who were admitted, not without trepidation, to his
apartment, which was almost an arsenal. It can scarcely be doubted that
the lurking madness of the Pitts found a full expression in him. As an
officer in the Navy, commanding a sloop in the West Indies, his conduct
fell little if at all short of insanity. It is not easy to understand
how even in those more facile times he escaped disgrace.
Eventually, at the age of twenty-nine he was killed in a wanton duel
with a Mr. Best. The circumstances of this mortal combat show that he
was a true Pitt of the Governor's headstrong breed. Both before the duel
and afterwards, on his death-bed, he acknowledged that he was the sole
wanton aggressor, and that his antagonist was blameless. But as Mr. Best
was reported the best pistol-shot in England, his pride would not allow
him to lend himself, however indirectly, to any sort of accommodation.
So he died, and with him died the eldest line of the Governor's branch
of Pitts. Boconnoc passed to his sister, Lady Grenville, wife of the
minister who was Chatham's nephew. The relations of the brothers-in-law
seem to have been on the Pitt model. 'Pique against Lord Grenville
explains his (Lord Camelford's) conduct,' writes Lady Holland.[19]
Despite all their idiosyncrasies it seemed impossible to keep the Pitts
and Grenvilles from quarrelling and blending.
All this may seem trivial enough, but it has an important, indeed
necessary, bearing on the story of William's life, as showing the stock
from which he sprang.
The harsh passions of the Governor and the petulant violence of his
heirs seem so outrageous and uncontrolled as to verge on actual
insanity. Shelburne explicitly states that 'there was a great deal of
madness in the family.' Every indication confirms this statement. What
seemed in the Governor brutality and excess, frequently developed in
his descendants into something little if at all short of mental
disorder. We thus trace to their source the germs of that haughty,
impossible, anomalous character, distempered at times beyond the
confines of reason, which made William so difficult to calculate or
comprehend.