The elder William Pitt entered the House of Commons at the age of
twenty-six, in the year 1735. At Eton and at Oxford his energies had
been devoted to a course of study that was admirably adapted to develop
the remarkable powers for which his name is so well known. We are told
that he was a devoted student of the classics, that he wrote out again
and again carefully-prepared translations of some of the great models
of ancient oratory, and that in this way he acquired his easy command
of a forcible and expressive style. His studies in English, too, were
directed to the same end. He read and reread the sermons of Dr. Barrow,
till he had acquired something of that great preacher’s copiousness of
vocabulary and exactness of expression. With the same end in view he
also performed the extraordinary task of going twice through Bailey’s
Dictionary, examining every word, and making himself, as far as
possible, complete master of all the shades of its significance. Joined
to these efforts was also an unusual training in elocution, which gave
him extraordinary command of a remarkable voice, and made him an actor
scarcely inferior to Garrick himself. It may be doubted whether any
one, since the days of Cicero, has subjected himself to an equal amount
of pure drudgery in order to fit himself for the duties of a public
speaker.
When Pitt entered the House of Commons, Walpole was at the height of
his power. Pitt’s first speech was on the occasion of the marriage
of the Prince of Wales in 1736; and, although it consisted mainly of
a series of high-sounding compliments, it attracted immediate and
universal attention on account of its fine command of language and
its general elegance of manner. United with these characteristics
was also a vein of irony that made it “gall and wormwood” to the
King and to Walpole. The Prince of Wales, as so often has happened
in English history, was at the head of the opposition to the
government. This opposition had been so strenuous as to provoke the
energetic displeasure of the King and of the First Minister. King
George’s animosity had gone so far as to forbid the moving of the
congratulatory address by the Minister of the Crown. This fact gave
to Pitt an opportunity which he turned to immediate account. Though
there was not a syllable in the speech that could be regarded as
disrespectful or improper, the orator so managed the subject as to give
to his compliments all the effect of the keenest irony. His glowing
utterances on the “filial virtues” of the son, and the “tender paternal
delight” of the father, showed to his astonished auditors that he was
concealing under the cover of faultless phrases an able and a dangerous
opposition. Walpole was filled with anxiety and alarm. He is said to
have remarked: “We must at all events muzzle that terrible cornet of
horse.” It is probable that the arts of bribery were attempted in
order to win over the young officer; but it is certain that, if the
effort was made, it met with failure, for Pitt remained inflexibly
attached to the Prince and the opposition. Walpole could at least throw
him into disgrace. Within two weeks after his speech, Pitt was deprived
of his commission.
The effect was what an acute politician should have foreseen. It made
the Court more odious; it created a general sympathy for the young
orator; it put him at the head of the new party known as the Patriots.
Walpole, from this moment, was obliged to assume the defensive, and his
power steadily declined till his fall in 1741. It was in a succession
of assaults upon Walpole that the great abilities of Pitt forced
themselves into universal recognition.
The sources of his power were two-fold. In the first place he made
himself the avowed champion of what may be called the popular part of
the Constitution. His effort was to rescue the government from those
corruptions which had kept Walpole so long in place, and had so long
stifled all the popular sentiments of the nation. In the interests
of this purpose he was the first to propose a reform of the House of
Commons, as a result of which there might be something like a true
representation of popular interests. The other source of his power was
in the methods and characteristics of his eloquence. He was not in a
true sense a great debator. His ability lay not in any power to analyze
a difficult and complicated subject and present the bearings of its
several parts in a manner to convince the reason. His peculiarities
were rather in his way of seizing upon the more obvious phases of the
question at issue, and presenting them with a nobility of sentiment, a
fervor of energy, a loftiness of conception, and a power of invective
that bore down and destroyed all opposition.
During much of the time between 1735 and 1755 Pitt was in the
opposition. When, on the fall of Walpole in 1741, Carteret came into
power, Pitt assailed his narrow views and sordid methods with such
energy that after three years he was given up as an object of merited
reprobation. Pelham was now called to the head of affairs; but he would
accept the office of First Minister only on condition that Pitt would
take office under him. The King for a long time resisted; but, after a
vain attempt to have a government formed under Pulteney, he gave his
assent. Thus Pitt became Paymaster of the Forces in 1746, an office
which he held till the death of Pelham in 1754.
But on the accession of Pelham’s brother, the Duke of Newcastle, he
once more fell into the opposition. The two years that followed were
the most brilliant period of his oratory. The ministry gave him ample
opportunities, and he took every occasion to improve them. Disasters
abounded in every quarter of the British Empire. The loss of Minorca,
the capture of Calcutta, the defeat of Gen. Braddock, the threatened
invasion of England by the French, were themes well calculated to call
forth his awful invective. The result was that Newcastle was driven
from his place. Public opinion demanded that the reins now be placed
in the hands of the only man fitted to hold them. Pitt became Prime
Minister in December of 1756.
But the personal dislike of the King still would allow him no success.
Newcastle with the support of the royal favor was able to defeat him in
the House of Commons; and in April, 1757, he was ordered to retire. But
the outburst of popular indignation showed itself in all parts of the
kingdom. The chief towns sent gold boxes containing the “freedom of the
cities” in token of their approval of the minister. As Horace Walpole
said: “It rained gold boxes.” The King was obliged to give way, and in
June of 1757 Pitt was recalled.
Then began his great career as a statesman. With a power that in
England has never been equalled, he infused his own spirit into all
those about him. The panic which had paralyzed all effort gave way to
an air of proud and defiant confidence. The secret was, that Pitt had
the faculty of transfusing his own zeal into all those with whom he
came in contact. “It will be impossible to have so many ships prepared
so soon,” said Lord Anson, when a certain expedition was ordered.
“If the ships are not ready,” cried out Pitt, “I will impeach your
Lordship, in the presence of the House.” The ships were ready; indeed,
so was every thing else as he required. And this was the spirit that
carried into England the energy of a new existence. Within little more
than two years all was changed. In Africa France was obliged to give
up every settlement she possessed. In India she was stripped of every
post, and, after defeat at sea, was obliged to abandon her contest for
the mastery of the East. In the New World the victories of the English
were even more striking and more important. A chain of French forts
had hemmed in the English settlers, and threatened the very existence
of the Colonies. One after another, Fort Duquesne, Ticonderoga, Crown
Point, Oswego, Niagara, Louisburg, and Quebec, fell into the hands of
the English. The war is summarized by saying that at the close of the
conflict, not a foot of territory was left to the French in the Western
World. In Europe the French were defeated at Créveldt and Minden; Havre
was bombarded; the fortifications at Cherbourg were destroyed; and the
great victory off Quiberon demolished the French Navy for the remainder
of the war. And yet, when in 1760 George III. ascended the throne,
he conspired with the Tory leaders to overthrow the great minister,
“in order,” as was finely said by Grattan, “to be relieved of his
superiority.” George was determined to follow his mother’s injunctions
and “be king.” The royal opposition succeeded in defeating Pitt on the
manner of beginning the Spanish war; and the most glorious ministry
that England had ever seen was brought to an end in October, 1761. In
four and a half years England had been taken from a state of extreme
humiliation and made the first power in Europe.
The remaining sixteen years of Pitt’s life with one brief interval,
were devoted to the Opposition. He was tortured with the gout, and
during much of this period was unable to be in his place in Parliament,
or even to leave his bed. But at times the energy of his will overcame
the infirmities of his body and he appeared in the House, where he
always made his voice and his influence felt. With the accession of
the Tories under the lead of the King, the traditional methods of
government were in danger. It was to combat these tendencies,—as he
said: “to restore, to save, to confirm the Constitution,”—that all his
powers of body and mind were directed. He was the champion of popular
interests in opposition to the usurping prerogatives of George III.
It was during this period that most of his speeches preserved to us
in one form and another were delivered. But the reporting of speeches
had not yet come into vogue. Most of his efforts were written out with
more or less fulness by some of his friends. The speech which every
school boy learns, beginning: “The atrocious crime of being a young
man,” was written out by Dr. Johnson. The speech on the Stamp Act,
delivered in January of 1766, was reported by Sir Robert Dean and Lord
Charlemont. The one selected for this collection, that on an Address to
the Throne concerning affairs in America, was reported by Hugh Boyd,
and is said to have been corrected by Chatham himself. It is probable
that no speeches ever lost more in the process of reporting than his;
for, more than any one else he was dependent on the circumstances and
the inspiration of the moment. An eminent contemporary said of him: “No
man ever knew so little what he was going to say”; and he once said
of himself: “When once I am up, every thing that is in my mind comes
out.” His speeches were in the matter of form strictly extemporaneous,
and they acquired their almost marvellous power, very largely from
those peculiarities of voice and manner which are wholly absent in the
printed form. Macaulay in one of his essays says of him: “His figure
was strikingly graceful and commanding, his features high, his eye full
of fire. His voice, even when it sunk to a whisper, was heard to the
remotest benches; and when he strained it to its fullest extent, the
sound rose like the swell of an organ of a great cathedral, shook the
house with its peal, and was heard through lobbies and down staircases
to the Court of Requests and the precincts of Westminster Hall. He
cultivated all these eminent advantages with the most assiduous care.
His action is described by a very malignant observer as equal to that
of Garrick. His play of countenance was wonderful; he frequently
disconcerted a hostile orator by a single glance of indignation or
scorn.” To understand the full power of his oratory, the reader must
keep these characteristics always in mind.
From the beginning of the reign of George III., Chatham, of course, was
almost constantly in the opposition. Afflicted by disease and saddened
by disappointment, he was seldom in Parliament; and sometimes even
when there, he was too weak to give adequate expression to his ardent
thoughts. He was “the great Commoner”; and his influence therefore was
much weakened when in 1767 he went into the House of Lords. But to
the last his character was above suspicion, and it was finely said of
him that “great as was his oratory, every one felt that the man was
infinitely greater than the orator.” Even Franklin said of him: “I
have sometimes seen eloquence without wisdom, and often wisdom without
eloquence; but in him I have seen them united in the highest degree.”
His death occurred on the 11th of May, 1778, in the seventieth year of
his age.