William Pitt the Younger: A Biography

by William Hague

  Even so, the situation seemed dire, and Camden was almost in despair for want of reinforcements from the mainland. In early June Pitt finally sent several thousand troops, to be followed by English militia. He also decided to replace Camden with Cornwallis, who would go to Dublin as both Lord Lieutenant and Commander-in-Chief. Cornwallis arrived in Dublin on 20 June; by then, however, the rebellion had spent its force. Tens of thousands of peasants led into battle by priests had fought valiantly but were too disorganised to overcome relatively small units of troops and militia armed with cannon. As the rebellion was crushed, loyalist militia took a pitiless revenge. It was a shattering blow to the United Irishmen, utterly defeated by treachery, coercion and the continued absence of the much-vaunted French invasion.

  Ireland had forced its way back into Pitt’s brain, and the conclusions he would draw would be radical and historic. For the moment, however, tension was high, he was once again unwell, and his patience was wearing thin. On 25 May he was engaged in presenting an Emergency Bill to the Commons to increase the supply of manpower for the navy by lifting the exemption from naval service hitherto enjoyed by men working in sea and river trades. This was opposed by George Tierney, a Foxite MP who had taken it upon himself to harass the government and lead a handful of parliamentary malcontents in the absence of Fox and other Whigs. Pitt became angry with Tierney’s call for longer consideration of the Bill: ‘He acknowledges that, were it not passed in a day, those whom it might concern might elude its effect, thus assigning himself the reason for its immediate adoption. But if the measure be necessary, and that a notice of it would enable its effect to be eluded, how can the honourable gentleman’s opposition to it be accounted for, but from a desire to obstruct the defence of the country?’18

  Tierney immediately appealed to the Speaker to rule as unparliamentary the accusation that he was deliberately ‘obstructing the defence of the country’. Addington failed to intervene decisively, and while the Pitt of former years might have made a deft semi-withdrawal of the insult while leaving it on the record, the Pitt of 1798 simply repeated the accusation. He insisted that Tierney was seeking ‘to obstruct the measures employed for the defence of the country. He knew very well that it was unparliamentary to state the motives that actuated the opinions of gentlemen, but it was impossible to go into arguments in favour of a question, without sometimes hinting at the motives that induced an opposition to it. He submitted to the judgement of the house the propriety and necessity of the arguments he had urged, and he would not depart from any thing he had there advanced, by either retracting or explaining them.’19

  What followed seems incredible from the vantage point of more than two hundred years later, but at the time was wholly predictable and in conformity with the manners of the age. The next day, Pitt received from Tierney a challenge to a duel, which he immediately accepted.

  In the eighteenth century, a duel was still the standard way in the upper reaches of society to obtain ‘satisfaction’ when insulted. Honour demanded that such a challenge should be met. The usual format involved each man appointing a ‘second’, usually a close friend, who together ensured that moral support was given, fair play observed, and the matter ended as soon as appropriate. The great majority of duels did not involve fatalities, sometimes because the participants deliberately fired wild, but often because it was not easy for an untrained man to hit an opponent with a pistol shot at a reasonable distance. Only two shots from each participant were normally allowed. Nevertheless, fatalities and serious injuries did occur. Fox had been injured in a duel in 1779. In the United States, six years after Pitt’s duel, Alexander Hamilton, the leader of the Federalists, was mortally wounded in a duel with Vice-President Aaron Burr.

  Pitt prepared for the contest with his usual sense of both thoroughness and integrity. Addington recalled: ‘I was dining with Lord Grosvenor, when a note was brought me from Mr. Pitt, stating that he had received a hostile message from Mr. Tierney, and wished me to go to him, which I did as soon as the party at Lord Grosvenor’s broke up. Mr. Pitt had just made his will when I arrived. He had sent in the first instance to Mr. Steele to be his second; but finding that he was absent, he sent next to Mr. Ryder. On the following day I went with Pitt and Ryder down the Birdcage Walk, up the steps into Queen Street, where their chaise waited to take them to Wimbledon Common.’20

  Thus it was that on the afternoon of Sunday, 27 May 1798, the British Prime Minister walked out onto Putney Heath and duly took twelve paces before turning and firing at his opponent. Mercifully, both of them missed; Pitt apparently fired his second shot into the air, and the seconds then intervened to give ‘their decided opinion that sufficient satisfaction had been given, and that the business was ended with perfect honour to both parties’.21 A small crowd had watched the affair, which took place near the gibbet of a recently hanged criminal. Back in Downing Street, Pitt sat down to explain the matter to Dundas, telling him that ‘I had occasion to visit your neighbourhood this morning, in order to meet Mr. Tierney,’22 and from Holwood next day he wrote a classic among the many letters of reassurance to his mother: ‘I have nothing to tell that is not perfectly agreeable. The newspapers of to day contain a short but correct Account of a meeting which I found it necessary to have with Mr. Tierney … The business terminated without any thing unpleasant to either Party …’23

  For all Pitt’s insouciance, there was nevertheless a good deal of shock at what had transpired. Duels among politicians were by no means unknown, and would continue to take place for some decades: Canning and Castlereagh fought a celebrated duel in 1809, and the Duke of Wellington would repeat the feat of duelling while Prime Minister in 1829. Nevertheless, Pitt had risked his life just as the dangers from invasion and rebellion neared their peak. George III wrote: ‘I trust what has happened will never be repeated … Public characters have no right to weigh alone what they owe to themselves; they must consider also what is due to their country.’24 He evidently did not share the humour of those who laughed at the idea of Pitt’s lanky frame duelling with the rotund figure of Tierney: they suggested that an outline of Pitt should have been chalked on Tierney, and no shots outside it should have been allowed to count.

  Most incensed of all, however, was Wilberforce, who combined concern for Pitt with hostility to duelling and outrage that such a thing should have happened on a Sunday. He was ‘more shocked than almost ever’,25 and gave notice of a Commons motion ‘Against the Principle of Duels’. In response, Pitt made clear that he would regard such a motion as one of censure: ‘If any step on the subject is proposed in Parliament and agreed to, I shall feel from that moment that I can be of more use out of office than in it; for in it, according to the feelings I entertain, I could be of none. I state to you as I think I ought distinctly and explicitly what I feel.’26 The agonised Wilberforce, under intense pressure from other MPs to withdraw his motion, duly did so, and was heartily thanked by Pitt for his ‘cordial friendship and kindness’.

  We do not know whether Pitt’s duel affected him psychologically, or whether its aftermath opened the floodgates of the strain and stress of the previous months. Whatever the cause, within days of discharging his pistol on Putney Heath he was back in his sickbed, and would not be seen in the Commons for some weeks. This was part of an increasingly familiar pattern, in which he would sustain for months on end his ability to deal with multiple crises and controversies, but would collapse after his many tasks had reached some kind of climax. In June 1798, Wilberforce and Auckland described him as ‘seriously’ or ‘very’ ill.27 Pitt himself confessed to Pretyman that he had been ‘making Exertions beyond my real Strength’.28 Even when he was meant to be well, his daily habits had steadily changed, and either exhaustion or alcohol was regularly keeping him in bed until eleven o’clock in the morning.

  When ill, Pitt outwardly retained his famed equanimity, complaining about newspaper coverage of his illness ‘that he cannot be ill quietly’.29 Soon he was insisting to his mother, as usual, t
hat he was absolutely fine: ‘I am growing stronger and stronger every day, and am as well as ever I was.’30 This, of course, was nonsense. Two months later, in early August, Auckland wrote: ‘He is greatly recovered, but is much shaken in his constitution, and must be very attentive as to diet, exercise, and hours. His spirits are as good and his mind as active as ever.’31

  Pitt went to Walmer to take a couple of weeks’ sea air, and then to visit his mother at Burton Pynsent in late August, but was back in Downing Street at the end of the month. His sense of duty and his need to control events meant that he could not rest for long, and this in turn meant that he did not give himself the chance to stage a full recovery. His physician Sir Walter Farquhar later wrote of this period: ‘I invariably and more urgently pressed the necessity of some relaxation from business, as I uniformly found a considerable accession of unpleasant symptoms in the Constitution from mental anxiety upon public affairs. All that I could do under such circumstances was to direct my attention to the stomach and bowels, and to strengthen and aid them by gentle bitters and mild medicines. For some years the health of Mr. Pitt was variable, & much affected by the change of seasons & of situation, but by great management & rigid attention to diet, he was generally relieved.’32

  Farquhar prescribed certain changes which involved a reduction in wine consumption (to some extent replaced with ale instead), the drinking of mineral waters, more exercise and more regular, smaller meals. Pitt seems to have stuck to this regimen at least for a time, when the House was not sitting in the summer and early autumn of 1798, but both physician and patient recognised that the origins of his illness lay in the incessant activity of his mind. Added to this was the pressure caused to one of such an optimistic disposition by seemingly endless disappointments and setbacks. Pitt told Pretyman at the end of October that ‘Farquhar’s Regimen (aided probably by our Victories and the State of the Revenue) has succeeded so well that … I have great hopes of being equal to the Busy Scene that is approaching.’33 Opposition newspapers circulated reports that summer, assisted by the striking combination of news of the duel and Pitt’s illness, that he was going insane, an allegation emphatically denied by his friends. The rumour-mongers were certainly wide of the mark, but no doubt enjoying their mischief. What is clear, however, is that the impact of military victory or defeat was ultimately felt in Pitt’s digestion, an effect which, when combined with other attributes of his lifestyle, would eventually kill him.

  Pitt was not the only one who would feel the tension that summer, for after Napoleon sailed from Toulon on 19 May, Nelson, now a Rear Admiral, simply could not find him. For ten weeks Nelson would criss-cross the Mediterranean in an increasingly frantic search for an entire army at sea. It may seem incredible that it was not possible to locate a force totalling 335 ships travelling at an average speed of only one knot, and indeed it was thought to be so at the time. Rose commented in September, before definitive news of Napoleon’s whereabouts had reached London, that it was ‘the most extraordinary Instance of the kind I believe in the Naval History of the World’.34 On 9 June the French arrived unmolested at Malta, which was quickly wrested from the centuries-old control of the Knights of St John. When news of this reached Nelson, he still could not be sure that Napoleon would not turn west and head out into the Atlantic, eventually launching a direct attack on Britain, but he guessed that he was heading for Egypt. He sailed so quickly to Alexandria that he had been and gone by the time Napoleon and his army actually arrived and stormed the city. The British Mediterranean Fleet had headed north to Turkey as the French army secured its position in Egypt and dealt a heavy defeat to the Mamelukes at the Battle of the Pyramids on 21 July.

  A mixture of motives seems to have drawn Napoleon to Egypt. British naval prowess made it too dangerous to hazard a large-scale invasion of the British Isles, while the defeat of all Continental enemies had left the great military commander, like Alexander in India two thousand years before, with ‘no more worlds to conquer’. In order to prosecute a war directly against British interests, and accelerate the rise of his own reputation and power, Napoleon chose to strike at ‘the key to the commerce of the East’. The seizure of Egypt could be a major blow to the British Empire, which was why Dundas feared ‘the calamitous consequences’35 when he heard the news. The Suez route to India would fall under French control, and British dominion over India could ultimately be threatened. Being utterly unexpected, Napoleon’s strategy also had the great merits for which he always looked: shock and surprise. It had the potential to be a strategic masterstroke.

  Napoleon, however, was not omniscient. He would not have known at the time he decided to sail for Egypt that Pitt had decided to send a British fleet, now numbering fourteen ships of the line, back into the Mediterranean. A huge amount now depended on how that fleet would perform. For on the afternoon of 1 August the lookout of the British line-of-battle ship Zealous spotted on the horizon a forest of masts which could only be the French Mediterranean Fleet. They were at anchor in Aboukir Bay, at the mouth of the Nile, in line of battle. One of the most decisive naval encounters of history was about to begin.

  In Aboukir Bay, the French Admiral Brueys had taken up a classic and formidable defensive position. He had placed his thirteen ships of the line close to the coast, with the additional cover of shore batteries and a fort. But Nelson viewed these ‘with the eye of a seaman determined on attack’, and was determined ‘to conquer, or perish in the attempt’.36 Nelson, already known for improvisation and daring, took three decisions at the outset which Brueys had not expected. First, he decided to attack immediately, with the first British ship rounding the point into the bay as the sun set. Second, he concentrated his attack on the opposite end of the French line from the one which the weather conditions would have suggested was more liable to be attacked, thus putting the greatest pressure on the weakest French ships. Third, he sent some of his ships actually around the French vanguard to position themselves in the narrow space between the enemy and the shore, an action fraught with navigational and military risks but exposing the French to broadsides from both sides simultaneously.

  It was as a result of these decisions that the Battle of the Nile produced an outcome far more complete than the British naval victories at Camperdown or Cape St Vincent the previous year, when a badly mauled enemy had eventually limped away. The confined space of the waters of Aboukir Bay and the brilliance of Nelson’s tactics meant that the Battle of the Nile was a battle of annihilation. The murderous cannonades of the Royal Navy, coming from both port and starboard, soon turned the vanguard and centre of the French line into an avenue of utter carnage. No navy on earth could withstand such a bombardment, much of it delivered at almost point-blank range. Although the French defended themselves gallantly, and Brueys himself fought on for some hours until dying of his wounds, the initial disposition of their force meant there was virtually nothing they could do. By late evening the flagship L’Orient was ablaze, with results recorded by Midshipman John Lee: ‘The din of war raged with such incontrollable violence – till at last an awful and terrific glare of light blinding the very sight showed L’Orient blowing up, with an astounding crash, paralysing all around her, by which near a thousand souls were hastened into eternity.’37 Fully eleven of the thirteen French ships of the line were destroyed or captured that night. The remaining two escaped from the battle, to be captured at a later date.

  Reports of the devastating victory took three months to reach Britain, partly because the frigate initially carrying the news was captured on the way back. Even weeks after the battle, therefore, the mood in London was jittery and strained. In late August the French had landed 1,100 men in north-west Ireland at Killala and routed the local militia while recruiting some locals to their side. If this expedition had been meant to trigger a successful rebellion it was too late, and shortly afterwards the small force was crushed by Cornwallis with 11,000 men.

  Throughout this episode, Pitt had waited anxiously for news of Nel
son, writing on 30 August: ‘The reports of Nelson’s success are again revived from various quarters, and will, I really believe, some how or other, prove true at last.’38 This time, his optimism was vindicated. When the full extent of the victory at the Nile became known, the rejoicing in Britain knew no bounds. The Royal Navy had destroyed an entire French fleet, and inflicted ten times as many casualties as it had suffered. Napoleon and his army were stranded in Egypt. Pitt returned to Downing Street from Holwood ‘in the highest possible spirits’, according to Pretyman. ‘Mr. Pitt is confident that Buonaparte must be destroyed. Oh my Love what joy!’39

  In fact, Napoleon was not destroyed, but he had made a mistake he would regret for the rest of his life, ruminating after Waterloo: ‘If, instead of the expedition to Egypt, I had undertaken that against Ireland, what could England have done now?’40 He had indeed made an error with multiple consequences: his army was cut off in Egypt, Turkey reacted to French aggression in the Mediterranean by joining the war against France, and the seizure of Malta had deeply upset Tsar Paul I of Russia, who held a quixotic and romantic attachment to the chivalrous ideas of the Knights of St John. A new coalition against France was in the making. The possible threat to India gave renewed force to British expansion there: the following year Mornington would go to war against Tipu Sultan, who had sought help from the French, and secure large tracts of territory for the East India Company. Above all, the French virtually gave up hope of challenging Britain at sea. In the words of one French historian: ‘Aboukir changed everything, as the navy lethargically resigned itself to its fate and left it to the army to ensure the survival of the Revolution … Aboukir marked the end of France as a naval power.’41

  Pitt’s happy mind raced that autumn, seizing the opportunity of victory on the Nile and the suppression of the Irish rebellion to find comprehensive solutions to the problems he had encountered that year. He sought a new coalition with clearly defined aims, a more sustainable and productive method of raising finance, and a settlement in Ireland which would end once and for all its propensity to rebellion and openness to invasion.