Pitt’s behaviour throughout the rest of his time in office would be affected by the setbacks and disappointments of 1785. Although he would still search for simple and elegant solutions to complex problems, he would in future take even greater care to prepare the ground, and would rarely risk defeat. He had not enjoyed the experience of finding himself in a minority in a Parliament where he was meant to be dominant, and, with the exception of one policy already set in motion, he would never again in the eighteenth century suffer such direct parliamentary reverses on matters central to the government. From now on he would temper his idealism with more wariness of the entrenched opinions of others.
* * *
*A well-known satirical play of the time.
11
Private by Nature
‘He was indeed endowed, beyond any man of his time, with a gay heart and a social spirit.’
LOUD MORNINGTON1
‘Pitt does not make friends.’
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE2
AFTER THE SETBACKS of the summer of 1785, Pitt’s friends were anxious for him. Wilberforce wrote from Lausanne in early August: ‘I cannot help being extremely anxious; your own character, as well as the welfare of the country are at stake … You may reckon yourself most fortunate in that cheerfulness of mind which enables you every now and then to throw off your load for a few hours & rest yourself. I fancy it must have been this which when I am with you, prevents my considering you as an object of compassion, tho’ Prime Minister of England; for now, when I am at a distance, out of hearing of your foyning, and your [illegible] other proofs of a light heart, I cannot help representing you to myself as oppressed with cares and troubles.’3
Wilberforce saw Pitt in one light when thinking of him as Prime Minister, but in quite another when thinking of him as a carefree friend. The difference is not surprising. Pitt’s manner outside his immediate circle was aloof and austere – ‘I know the coldness of the climate you go into,’ Shelburne told a colleague about to visit Pitt. He ‘never partook of the common amusements of London life’ once war had begun in the 1790s, and very rarely once in office in the 1780s.4 In more familiar company his shyness evaporated, along with any need to compensate for his youthfulness by appearing stem: it was said by Lord Mornington (later Marquess Wellesley, and the future Duke of Wellington’s brother, who became a close friend) that in ‘society’ ‘he shone with a degree of calm and steady lustre, which often astonished me more than his most splendid efforts in Parliament. His manners were perfectly plain … his wit was … quick and ready.’5 Pitt had no social ambitions, and it was rare for him deliberately to set out to make a friend, although George Rose, and later George Canning, were exceptions to this. The talented collaborators of his first eighteen months in office – Beresford, Wyvill and Twining – passed in and out of his mind along with their areas of expertise.
Pitt was at his happiest in the company of his Cambridge companions or his family, and in the summer recess of 1785 he was instrumental in bringing family and friends closer together. His sister Harriot had by this stage moved into Downing Street with him, and sometimes acted as his hostess. Pretyman’s wife observed ‘’twas pity She was his Sister, for no other woman in the World was suited to be his wife’.6 Edward Eliot, still one of Pitt’s closest friends, often stayed there too, and the result was a strong attachment between sister and friend. When Eliot’s father suggested their marriage be delayed until an expected inheritance had come to his son, Pitt intervened with a letter from Downing Street, saying that a delay could not ‘be reconciled to the happiness of either of them’,7 and they were married less than a fortnight later.
By late September Pitt was at Brighton with his intimate friends, going on to Salisbury to meet the happy couple and then to Burton Pynsent to see his mother. Three weeks later he had returned to Downing Street, once again via Brighton, writing to his mother on 20 October: ‘Your letter found me exceedingly safe at Brighthelmstone, not-withstanding all the perils of thunder and lightning, which overtook me at Mr. Bankes’s at the end of a long day’s shooting, and were attended with no more consequences than a complete wetting. My conscience has reproached me a good deal for not having sent this certificate of myself sooner.’
Pitt was now twenty-six, but the delicacy of his childhood meant that his mother never lost her fear of him catching a cold. Her letters of this time to Edward Wilson convey a mother’s mixture of pride and anxiety. In November 1784 she writes, ‘I have lived a long time upon the pleasure of expecting him, and if he comes I shall live a long time after upon the pleasure of having seen him.’8 Four months later, Pitt had still not made it to Burton Pynsent: ‘What infinite happiness that my young great man should have stood this most rigorous season without suffering more from it than a common cold … I cou’d not help a thousand tears about it, tho’ Harriot was very attentive in giving me continual accounts of him … His not making me his intended visit alter’d extremely the whole cast of the winter to me, for it would have secured me a foundation of pleasure that wou’d have carried me more agre’ably through it.’9
She need not have worried about his physical well-being. Throughout his twenties Pitt enjoyed robust good health: it was only in his mid-thirties that pressure of war and quantity of alcohol began to take their toll. His weight was stable, being recorded in the Weighing Books at 3 St James’s Street in 1783 as eleven stone 11.5 pounds in shoes and frock coat, and twelve stone exactly three years later. The weighing scales can still be seen at the same location, now the headquarters of Berry Brothers and Rudd. At this stage the only intrusion on his health was the growth of a cyst on his cheek early in 1786. There were no anaesthetics in the eighteenth century, but the doctors said the cyst had to be cut out, and John Hunter, Surgeon Extraordinary to George III, was appointed to do it. Pitt refused to have his hands tied, as would have been normal during a painful operation, and sat motionless with his eyes fixed on the Horseguards clock, having been told the operation would take six minutes. Hunter is said to have observed that he had never seen ‘so much fortitude & courage in all his practice’,10 while the only comment of his patient was: ‘You have exceeded your time half a minute.’
With Wilberforce in Europe and Eliot honeymooning with Harriot, Pitt spent his Brighton retreat in the early autumn of 1785 with his other closest Cambridge friends, Bob Smith, John Pratt and Tom Steele. In itself, this should not have been regarded as surprising: many twenty-six-year-olds continue with their circle of teenage friends until circumstances force them to change, and to Pitt’s mind becoming Prime Minister was not such a circumstance. Nevertheless, the habits and friendships of such a pre-eminent twenty-six-year-old occasioned a great deal of comment. Pitt’s lack of interest in enlarging his social circle meant that it did not grow to encompass any women outside his own family, a fact that produced a good deal of rumour. From late 1784, satirical verses about Pitt and his friends and colleagues appeared under the title ‘Criticisms of the Rolliad’ in the Morning Herald. The writers were witty gentlemen ensconced in Brooks’s Club, and the title was based on the Pittite MP John Rolle, to whose partisanship they had taken a particular dislike. Deprived of power, they enjoyed themselves hugely penning couplets which would annoy the government. Sometimes they were simply sarcastic about Pitt’s age, as in this famous extract:
A sight to make surrounding nations stare,
A Kingdom trusted to a school boy’s care.
Other verses were directed at the physical appearance of Pitt’s Ministers. Lord Sydney, for example, had a prominent chin:
O, had by nature but proportion’d been,
His strength of genius to his length of chin,
His mighty mind in some prodigious plan,
At once with ease had reach’d Hindostan!
For Grenville, who would later become a prominent ally of Pitt, comment was reserved for a different part of his anatomy:
What plenteous stores of knowledge may contain,
The spacious tenement of
Grenville’s Brain;
Nature, in all her dispensations wise,
Who form’d his headpiece of so vast a size,
Hath not, ’t is true, neglected to bestow
Its due proportion to the part below;
And hence we reason, that to serve the state
His top and bottom may have equal weight.
Other verses attacked Pitt’s Downing Street circle:
The Lyars
In Downing Street, the breakfast duly set,
As Bankes and Pretyman one morn were met,
A strife arising who could best supply,
In urgent cases, a convenient lie …
There were many verses drawing attention to Pitt’s lack of knowledge of women, such as these ‘On the Immaculate Boy’:
’Tis true, indeed, we oft abuse him,
Because he bends to no man;
But slander’s self dares not accuse him
Of stiffness to a woman
and:
The virulent fair
Protest and declare
This Ministry’s not to their hearts;
For say what they will,
To them Master Bill,
Has never discovered his parts.
A particular prominence was reserved in the ‘Rolliad’ for Pitt’s friendship with Steele, highlighted by the visits to Brighton. George Rose and Tom Steele were both Secretaries to the Treasury, and the ‘Rolliad’ implied that the hardworking Rose was jealous of the fresh-faced Steele:
But vain his hope to shine in Billy’s eyes,
Vain all his votes, his speeches, and his lies.
Steele’s happier claims the boy’s regard engaged,
Alike their studies, nor unlike their age:
With Steele, companion of his vacant hours,
Oft would he seek Brighthelmstone’s sea-girt towers;
For Steele relinquish Beauty’s trifling talk,
With Steele each morning ride, each evening walk;
Or in full tea-cups drowning cares of state
On gentler topics urge the mock debate.
There were many references in the ‘Rolliad’ to Steele making or drinking tea, considered at that time to be a feminine preoccupation:
Where beauteous Brighton overlooks the sea,
These be his joys: and STEELE shall make the Tea.
Such rumours and writings were always more of a tease than an accusation, but those who read them or wrote them must have had their suspicions. We have no sure evidence that Pitt was homosexual: no surviving letter or diary of any of his friends gives any hint of it, no enemy directly alleged it even after his death. Nevertheless there was a good deal of innuendo and gossip. At the height of the constitutional crisis in 1784, Sheridan had compared Pitt to James I’s favourite the Duke of Buckingham, a clear reference to homosexuality. Socially, Pitt preferred the company of young men, and would continue to do so as he advanced into his thirties and forties. But in other respects his behaviour did not offer any clue to homosexual inclinations. It also seems unlikely that a man with such an overpowering sense of ambition and duty, who easily commanded the willpower to avoid misdemeanours at Cambridge and to stop gambling at Goostree’s, whose whereabouts were always known and who, according to Pretyman, never locked his bedroom door at night, would take any sexual risk that would threaten his political career.
This may, of course, be the answer to the mystery: that Pitt had homosexual leanings but suppressed any urge to act on them for the sake of his ambitions. Social attitudes were more hostile to such tendencies in the late eighteenth century than they are today, or had been only a few decades before. It is possible that the suppression of private feelings added to Pitt’s apparent aloofness and his dedication to work. He could be charming to women, but it seems certain that he rejected intimacy whenever it was proffered – and would do so publicly at a later date. In practical terms it appears that Pitt was essentially asexual throughout his life, perhaps one example of how his rapid development as a politician stunted his growth as a man.
Pitt may have lacked the appetite for new social relationships, but he would also have discovered that a politician who comes to high office inevitably faces formidable difficulties in making new friends. Colleagues at the top of a government are generally thrown together by some mixture of duty, conviction and circumstances; hardly ever by friendship, as usually becomes apparent whenever one of them runs into trouble. Those outside high office seeking to become friends of such a powerful Minister as Pitt will usually have been seeking advancement or promotion, and Pitt even more than most Ministers found such matters distasteful. Add to that his natural shyness and bookish, problem-solving mind, and it is not surprising that he clung to the familiar. His lack of experience of a world beyond Cambridge and Westminster sometimes put him at a disadvantage, as the setbacks of 1785 had demonstrated. Wilberforce, while testifying to Pitt’s ‘extraordinary precision of understanding’, also observed: ‘You always saw where you differed from him and why. The difference arose commonly from his sanguine temper leading him to give credit to information which others might distrust, and to expect that doubtful contingencies would have a more favourable issue than others might venture to anticipate.’11 Another MP commented that Pitt’s mind ‘was confined to the details of business, before He had sufficiently acquainted himself either with Politicks or men’, and a later ministerial colleague, William Windham, said that Pitt had not had ‘the opportunities of seeing men and manners, except as a minister, not the most favourable way of seeing men’.12 As a result, the air of innocence which continued to characterise Pitt’s personal friendships affected his political decision-taking, and led naturally to disappointments.
What lay behind the contrasting sides of Pitt’s personality – the testimony of Mornington and others to his delightful company, and yet of Wilberforce that he ‘did not make friends’? How was it that he had so much to discuss with some people, but to others had nothing to say? He is not alone among politicians in dividing the people around him, probably unconsciously, into three groups. One very small group consisted of his absolutely nearest and dearest. This included his mother, for whom he would make any financial sacrifice, and his surviving sister, to whom he was obviously deeply attached. Later in life his niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, would fulfil a similar role. He evidently loved being near to them, but had no interest in their political opinions. Many politicians seek in their families a release from politics, and find family members less well informed about politics than their other friends: once in office Pitt would write to his mother with news of political successes coupled with reports of his health, but he no longer sought her opinion about national affairs.
The second group comprised those people with whom Pitt needed regular contact because of their rank or position, but whose company he would never have sought for its own sake. Foremost among this group is King George III himself. Pitt and the King had stood together and triumphed in the crisis of 1783–84: each needed the cooperation of the other, and there is no doubt that a mutual respect and a working relationship had developed. Yet even the long years to come, working in harness, would not give rise to personal warmth between them. Not surprisingly, Pitt seemed to find long audiences with the King tiresome. George III was given to intransigent declarations and flitting from one subject to another, neither of which would have appealed to Pitt’s rational and focused mind. Rather than seeing the King personally, he developed the habit of writing to him at length on serious issues, setting out the arguments in a logical way and awaiting a written reply. The temperaments of the two men were very different; so too would be their perceptions of the period before they formed their alliance. Pitt probably never forgot the slight to his father’s memory when the court boycotted his funeral, and certainly would not have forgotten the hostility he felt to the apparent abuse of royal power during the war in America. For his part, the King evidently never forgot the earlier refusal of Pitt to form a government, and when d
elirious in 1789 he ‘abused Mr. Pitt much … & called him a Boy; said that He had wanted him to step forward at the close of Lord Lansdowne’s [Shelburne’s] Administration, but that He was afraid’.13 For all the fact that they would work closely together for many years, and that the King would subsequently pour much praise on Pitt’s head, a personal distance would always remain.
The same pattern of necessity of alliance but absence of intimacy characterised Pitt’s relations with most other political figures, including his entire Cabinet until it was later joined by his brother, his cousin Grenville, and Dundas. Pitt observed the forms of social interchange with his Cabinet colleagues, hosting Cabinet dinners from time to time and occasionally dining alone with Sydney or Carmarthen. But these people were pieces on his political chessboard rather than contributors to his ideas or his enjoyment of life. All of the senior Ministers with whom he started out would at some stage complain vehemently of being unaware of major decisions. The deeply conservative Thurlow was almost always opposed to Pitt’s ideas of reform, remained personally close to the King and was a rival centre of power within the administration. Pitt had a weary respect for him, but often left him out of decisions. When the Bill to restore to the original owners Scottish estates confiscated in the 1745 rebellion was presented in the House of Lords (having been pressed on Pitt by Dundas), Thurlow said that he welcomed it but, despite being a member of the Cabinet, had no previous knowledge of the Bill’s existence. Sydney fumed that control of Indian affairs passed steadily into the hands of Dundas, and Carmarthen would find that Pitt would take over many of his functions as soon as a foreign-policy crisis erupted. Pitt needed Cabinet colleagues, but he felt no need to keep them fully involved.
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 24
