Inevitably, there are plenty of stories in which visitors to the Pitt household claim prescience about the child’s future greatness. Lady Holland, mother of Charles James Fox, is meant to have said, ‘I have been this morning with Lady Hester Pitt, and there is little William Pitt, not eight years old and really the cleverest child I ever saw; and brought up so strictly and so proper in his behaviour, that, mark my words, that little boy will be a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives.’18 Other reports include the young William standing up on a mounting block and addressing the trees as if they were Members of the House of Commons. Such stories may be fanciful, but the essential point, that he was extraordinarily well versed in politics and philosophy at a remarkably early age, certainly stands up to examination. Family correspondence refers to him as ‘the Philosopher’, ‘the Young Senator’, ‘Eager Mr. William’ and ‘Impetuous William’. In 1766, when he was seven, his tutor wrote of him and his sister:
Lady Hester and Mr. Pitt still continue to surprise and astonish as much as ever; and I see no possibility of diminishing their ardour either by too much business or too much relaxation. When I am alone reading, Mr. Pitt, if it is any thing he may attend to, constantly places himself by me, where his steady attention and sage remarks are not only entertaining but useful; as they frequently throw a light upon the subject, and strongly impress it on my memory.19
The same tutor, Edward Wilson, who taught all the Pitt children at home because of their father’s unforgiving recollections of public school, marvelled on another occasion that William ‘seemed never to learn but merely to recollect’.20 At the age of seven he was able to write letters in Latin to his father, and also did so in English in a rather pompous and wordy style. With his father delivering thundering orations against the Stamp Act in the Commons in early 1766, William showed an insatiable appetite for political news. ‘I expect many sage reflections from William upon the public papers,’ his father wrote to his mother, and later that year, with a peerage for the elder Pitt in prospect, William commented that he was glad he was not the eldest son, because ‘he could serve his country in the House of Commons like his Papa’.21
A seven-year-old with such attitudes and interests in our own times would probably find them beaten out of him at school, and indeed that could as easily have happened in the 1760s. William had the advantage of mixing almost exclusively with his own siblings, his tutor and adult family members, most of whom encouraged his political interest. The poet William Hayley reported when William was a boy of fourteen that he ‘eclipsed his brother in conversation’.22 It is hard to think that he was not sometimes an irritation to his brothers and sisters; as the historian J. Holland Rose commented, ‘the boy … narrowly escaped being a prodigy of priggishness’.23 His narrow escape seems to have been made possible by an easygoing disposition and pleasant temperament, which made it easier for him to win friends in a small circle. He was also a rather sickly child, with frequently recurring problems in the nose and throat, and many coughs and colds. His fragility probably helped the other children to put up with his bookish ways.
Father and son showed a deep attachment to each other. ‘If I should smoke,’ the elder Pitt wrote, ‘William would instantly call for a pipe.’24 He would in later years describe William as ‘the hope and comfort of my life’.25 In 1772, when Hester took the three eldest children to Hayes and left William and his younger brother with their father at Burton Pynsent, the elder Pitt wrote:
My dearest life will read with joy that the boys go on well. I believe William’s sequestration, as he learnedly terms it, agrees better with his contemplative constitution than more talk and more romps. Airing, literature, the arts, tea-table, sober whist and lecturing Papa for staying out too late, together with the small amusement of devouring a joint of mutton, or so, before I can look about, make up our daily occupations.26
His wife replied: ‘I do not in the least wonder that the style of William’s present life agrees with him. It is certainly not better suited to the state of his constitution, than to the fineness of his mind, which makes him enjoy with the highest pleasure what would be above the reach of any other creature of his small age.’27
In 1772 William even wrote a play, performed by the Pitt children, which was wholly political in content and eerily foreshadowed the Regency crisis in which he would play the real lead role seventeen years later. It is obvious that he showed academic gifts and political interest from an exceptionally early age, encouraged and nurtured by the adults around him, and that he enjoyed a pleasant and sheltered upbringing in the midst of a loving family. In all these respects he was very fortunate, but he was not unique. There must have been something more to his formative years, even before he went to university at the age of fourteen, to equip him to carry out the functions of Prime Minister at the age of twenty-four.
There were at least three factors which, in the formation of the young William Pitt’s personality and opinions, were not only fortunate but truly unique. The first was that a father who had himself dominated the House of Commons and presided over a government took an active, usually daily, role in his education. At no other time in British history has the head of one administration acted as the tutor of another. A home education seems to have been well suited in any case to a child of William’s temperament and health, but Mr Wilson’s tuition was frequently supplemented by the ministrations of the elder Pitt. Bishop Tomline, in his surprisingly uninformative biography of the younger Pitt written shortly after his death, reports that ‘when his lordship’s health would permit, he never suffered a day to pass without giving instruction of some sort to his children; and seldom without reading a chapter of the Bible with them’.28 While the elder Pitt seems to have been attentive to all his children, he particularly enjoyed passing on to William examples of eloquence from contemporary or classical writers and speakers, and asking him to study them. He taught him to speak in a clear and melodious voice by making him recite each day passages from the best English poets, particularly Shakespeare and Milton. Another biographer of the younger Pitt, Lord Stanhope, wrote the following with the advantage of his father having spoken to Pitt himself:
My father had the honour to be connected in relationship with that great man – and, as such, he had the privilege of being in the house with him sometimes for many weeks together. Presuming on that familiar intercourse, he told me, he ventured on one occasion to ask Mr. Pitt by what means – by what course of study – he had acquired that admirable readiness of speech – that aptness of finding the right word without pause or hesitation. Mr. Pitt replied that whatever readiness he might be thought to possess in that respect, he believed that he derived it very much from a practice his father – the great Lord Chatham – had recommended to him. Lord Chatham had bid him take up any book in some foreign language with which he was well acquainted, in Latin, Greek, or French, for example. Lord Chatham then enjoined him to read out of this work into English, stopping where he was not sure of the word to be used in English, until the right word came to his mind, and then proceed. Mr. Pitt states that he had assiduously followed this practice. At first he had often to stop for a while before he could recollect the proper word, but he found the difficulties gradually disappear, until what was a toil to him at first became at last an easy and familiar task.29
By the time he arrived at Cambridge in 1773, William could apparently read into English six or seven pages of Thucydides, without previous study of it and with barely a mistake. He may have been educated at home but he had in effect attended a master school in the use of language and its delivery. In addition he showed a strong early aptitude for mathematics. Uninhibited by peer pressure and required from the outset to meet adult standards, he developed early on a highly unusual ability to speak clearly, structure an argument, and think on his feet.
Secondly, he must have realised at a very early age that he belonged to a father and a family who stood apart from and were treated differently to everyone else. His father had
become a national institution, and was greeted when he travelled with greater reverence than anyone else outside the Royal Family. When the Pitt family set off for their summer break by the sea in Weymouth or Brighthelmstone (modern-day Brighton) or Lyme Regis, bells were rung in their honour and flowers strewn before them. Travelling to Weymouth by coach in 1766, the family heard the bells of Yeovil ringing in their honour as they passed, and a deputation of Mohican chiefs, on their way to London with a petition, were waiting there to greet them. In an age when the inheritance of names and traits counted for more than it does today, the younger Pitt always knew that he was the son of a very great man, and that everyone else knew it too.
The third unique aspect of the younger Pitt’s early life is more complex, more debatable, but no less compelling. In the years 1765 to 1768 the career of his father took a series of dramatic turns, briefly for the better and then decidedly for the worse. At this time the elder Pitt took a series of decisions, some of which would have seemed wise at the time, but many of which must have appeared almost immediately to have been risky or foolish. While a child between the ages of six and nine cannot normally be expected to appreciate the finer points of the political events of the day, it is hard to imagine that this boy, with his precocious interest in politics, did not absorb some deep and lasting lessons from what happened. His father was in this period not only his tutor but also a living daily example of the perils of politics.
Several times between 1763 and 1766 the elder Pitt was asked to return to head the King’s government and refused to do so. By 1763, the King’s mentor and friend, the Earl of Bute, had discovered he had neither the aptitude nor the appetite for day-to-day politics, and resigned. King George III thus learnt at an early stage of his reign that he had to work with at least some of the politicians already available in Parliament rather than invent new ones, and that an effective Minister whom he partly disliked could be a better bet than an ineffective one he doted on. Several years of political instability now followed. The government was at first headed by George Grenville, Hester’s brother, who after a short time the King cordially hated and wanted rid of. Next came the Marquis of Rockingham, who did not have the parliamentary support to sustain an administration. Throughout this time, the elder Pitt reverted to his earlier behaviour of being a trenchant critic of Ministers, except that he now did so from a far more commanding position, that of a former head of the government. He broke off occasionally from his rural pursuits and the education of his children to go down to the House of Commons and thunder out his denunciation of the government, first attacking the Treaty of Paris, which brought an end to the Seven Years’ War, for being too generous to the nation’s enemies, then making no fewer than fifteen speeches attacking the handling of the case of John Wilkes, and then a determined campaign to overturn George Grenville’s Stamp Act. The Stamp Act was a tax on legal documents in North America, introduced by Grenville as a means of raising revenue from the colonists, who enjoyed the protection of the British army but paid nothing towards it. It was deeply hated in America, and the elder Pitt was determined to overturn it, advocating conciliation of the colonies rather than aggravation of their discontent. Grenville having been forced from office, and the Stamp Act being overturned in early 1766, Pitt was once again acclaimed by the City and the crowds outside the Palace of Westminster. He was not in the least troubled that in pursuing this campaign he was also destroying the policies and administration of his brother-in-law.
The young William would certainly have heard of the devastating use his father had made of the power of speech on these occasions, and he is likely to have witnessed for himself his father’s repeated decisions to refuse to take office unless given cast-iron authority over the government. The King could offer the leadership of an administration, but Pitt could refuse it. On one occasion in 1765 the Duke of Cumberland arrived at Hayes with an escort of guards, a Royal Duke sent personally by the King to invite the elder Pitt to form a government. We do not know if William was watching from the windows, but we do know that his father declined the offer, since ‘nothing was conveyed that might have for object or end anything like my settling an administration upon my own plans’.30 Being in office, his father knew, was not the same as being in power. Eventually, the only stumbling block to Pitt’s return was the refusal of another brother-in-law, Richard, Earl Temple, to serve with him. But later in 1766 Pitt did indeed form a government and included in it most of the people he wanted. Protracted negotiation with the King was evidently worth it, a lesson not lost on his son, who was to be offered the premiership four times before accepting it.
It was at this stage that the elder Pitt made a major mistake. On becoming the King’s First Minister he also accepted an earldom, ‘Viscount Burton Pynsent and Earl of Chatham in the County of Kent’. In all probability, he wanted to set up his family as one of the great families of the land. He already had the estate. The next step was the title, and this was the great opportunity to acquire it. He was also tired and of course frequently ill, preferring to preside over an administration from the more genteel House of Lords without the endless knockabout of the Commons. The consequences were disastrous, according to the poet Thomas Gray the ‘weakest thing ever done by so great a man’.31 At a stroke, the Great Commoner was no more. The man whose reputation had partly rested on being apart from the landed aristocracy had joined it, and the man highly regarded for his independence from the King had accepted the generous patronage of the Crown. It did immense damage to his support around the country, which had always been his strongest card. Worse still, in practical terms it disabled his government from the outset in the House of Commons, where his oratorical skills were no longer available. One Minister resigned rather than face the additional workload and stress that would result. Chatham compounded all this by taking the title Lord Privy Seal rather than First Lord of the Treasury, again to lighten his burden but thereby omitting to control the central function of his government. It is unlikely that these mistakes were lost on his son. There is no evidence of what he thought about them, but throughout his career he steered well clear of repeating them.
The energy of Chatham’s administration was spent within a few months, and so was his own. According to Admiral Keppel, later a celebrated naval and political figure: ‘He [Chatham] governs absolutely, never deigns even to consult any of the Ministers, is now at Bath, and all business is at a stop.’32 William watched his father retreat into illness, possibly into what would later be called manic depression. From the spring of 1767 he became an invalid, refusing to handle the business of government or to see more than a few chosen people, despite being supposed to be in charge of the country. This situation lasted for eighteen months until the King finally and reluctantly accepted that Chatham could not continue. Again there is no direct account of what young William thought of his father’s illness or what effect it had on him. We do know of the patience, loyalty and sheer endurance displayed by his mother. Coping calmly with the dire illness of the man she loved, Hester also dealt personally with the incoming correspondence from Cabinet Ministers and even the King. It would be an exaggeration to say that she was running the government, which now lost its central direction, but she was highly effective at preventing the government from running her husband. It is unlikely that the sight of his mother dealing with all the great potentates of the nation did not make some lasting impression on William. Not only could his father be the master of other politicians, but his mother proved rather effective at it as well.
William Pitt lived through all these events, with enough knowledge to make some sense of them, before he was ten years old. They do not seem to have disturbed his studious mind or happy disposition, but they would certainly have demonstrated to him that there need be no limit to his ambition.
* * *
* In the eighteenth century a British Cabinet contained two Secretaries of State (compared to fifteen today). The Secretary of State for the Southern Department dealt with matters r
elating to southern European countries, including France and Spain; the Secretary of State for the Northern Department dealt with northern European countries such as Russia. In 1782 this arrangement was revised into one Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and one for Home and Colonial Affairs.
* Old Sarum, near Salisbury, was to become the most famous of all rotten boroughs when early in the nineteenth century it continued to return two Members of Parliament while ceasing to have any voters at all. In 1728 Colonel Harrison, the Pitt nominee, defeated Henry Fox in a by-election by a four to one margin, literally four votes to one.
* The Royal Family were Hanoverians by descent. In this period the King of England was also the hereditary ruler (Elector) of Hanover.
* Henry Fox, father of Charles James Fox, is thought to have made £400,000 as Paymaster, a vast sum in those days.
2
Cambridge and the World
‘He is of a tender Age, and of a health not yet firm enough to be indulged, to the full, in the strong desire he has to acquire useful knowledge. An ingenious mind and docility of temper will, I know, render him conformable to your Discipline, in all points. Too young for the irregularities of a man, I trust, he will not, on the other hand, prove troublesome by the Puerile sallies of a Boy.’
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 3
