William Pitt the Younger: A Biography

by William Hague

  The week which began with the news of Ulm on Sunday, 3 November would come to encapsulate the story of Pitt’s struggle against France. The news of Ulm was all too representative of Napoleon’s ability to outmarch and outfight any other force on the Continent of Europe, but the rest of the week would bring reports of Britain developing an unchallenged dominion of the seas, and would culminate in Pitt’s single most famous speech of defiance and inspiration. For in the early hours of Thursday, 7 November, news reached London of a huge naval battle fought on 21 October off Cape Trafalgar in south-west Spain.

  The combined fleet of French and Spanish warships had left Cadiz bound for the Mediterranean, but had been intercepted by Nelson and attacked by his fleet in a daring and unconventional formation. In the ensuing action the largest fleet at Napoleon’s disposal had been destroyed. The despatch of Admiral Collingwood reported ‘twenty sail of the line captured … The most decisive and complete victory that ever was gained over a powerful enemy.’41 It was the Nile all over again, but this time on twice the scale, and it would open more than a century of British naval supremacy. Nelson, who had sent to his fleet perhaps the most famous signal in the annals of the Royal Navy – ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’ – had given Pitt the crushing victory he had promised him in Downing Street, but had lost his own life in the process. Pitt was wakened with the news, and later that month Fitzharris noted his reflections:

  I shall never forget the eloquent manner in which he described his conflicting feelings when roused in the night to read Collingwood’s despatches. Pitt observed, that he had been called up at various hours in his eventful life by the arrival of news of various hues; but that whether good or bad he could always lay his head on his pillow and sink into sound sleep again. On this occasion, however, the great event announced brought with it so much to weep over as well as to rejoice at, that he could not calm his thoughts; but at length got up, though it was three in the morning.42

  In Britain, naval victories have always brought forth tumultuous rejoicing, and Trafalgar, the greatest of them all, was no exception. The scenes as Pitt travelled to the annual Lord Mayor’s Banquet at the Guildhall on the Saturday night, 9 November, were reminiscent of those at the peaks of his popularity in 1784 and 1789. His carriage was hauled along by exultant crowds, and once inside he was toasted by the Lord Mayor as ‘the Saviour of Europe’. Arthur Wellesley considered that ‘he returned thanks in one of the best and neatest speeches I ever heard in my life’.43 It must have been one of Pitt’s shortest speeches, and it has certainly become the most famous:

  I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me; but Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.

  This simple, dignified but uplifting speech was the culmination of an entire lifetime of speech-making. It was to be the last time his voice would be heard in public.

  According to Wellesley, Pitt did not seem ill that evening, and indeed bullied the opposition MP Thomas Erskine out of making a partisan speech during the course of the meal; but all was not well behind the scenes. According to Farquhar: ‘In the months of October and November 1805 he suffered much from an Increase of his usual pains in the Stomach and in the Head – the loss of Appetite, with the addition of flying pains in his feet and limbs.’ Farquhar urged him to go to Bath, ‘but he would not leave Town where anxious business detained him. At this period indeed, with the encreasing Symptoms of disease, an accumulation of public business appeared to overpower him.’44

  Pitt was waiting anxiously for news from Harrowby in Berlin, himself about to suffer some kind of breakdown under the extreme stress and difficulty of the negotiations. On the face of it, the prospects were still good, and the Prussians were actively discussing military dispositions and the coordination of their plans with the British, even as the issue of Hanover remained unresolved. Pitt was still optimistic: he wrote to Canning the day of the news of Trafalgar that Europe could still be saved by the end of the year. The continuing absence of a decision by Frederick William III, however, began to wear on the nerves of Ministers as November progressed: the Cabinet was evidently very troubled by the continuing lack of an agreement with Berlin at its meeting on 23 November. The uncertainty bore heavily on Pitt, for both the prospects for military victory and the recruitment of additional domestic support for the government depended a great deal on a Prussian alliance. In the absence of the latter, he was being pestered by Canning for promotion to the Cabinet, and at the end of November he decided to bring both Canning and Charles Yorke into the Cabinet to strengthen its ability in the House of Commons.

  Canning had also joined Farquhar in urging Pitt to take the waters at Bath – after Farquhar had prescribed ‘gentle bitters with Rhubarb and Magnesia’ Pitt had ‘again rallied but only for a short time’. Once again suffering from gout, he agreed to go to Bath to try to recover his health before the opening of the next session of Parliament in January. A suitable house was found for him at 2 Johnson Street, and he left London on 7 December. As is inevitable when a Prime Minister moves location for some weeks during a major crisis, many others followed. Pitt had numerous visitors – Canning, Melville, Mulgrave and Hawkesbury – who came to him to transact official business but also to provide company and humour. While he was still ‘counting moments’45 for news from Berlin, Mulgrave and Canning tried to occupy him with correcting their verses celebrating the Battle of Trafalgar. Canning recorded that it was ‘a great comfort to have happened to contribute so much to his amusement, and his criticisms have really helped me a great deal in amending & perfecting the Poem’.46 For much of December the efforts to restore Pitt’s health appeared to go to plan. He had to be careful about the times at which he visited the Pump Room, because a large crowd would form in expectation of his appearance, but he started drinking the waters soon after his arrival, then stopped when the gout returned, and resumed around Christmas Day. He wrote to Farquhar on 15 December that ‘I do not at present see the smallest occasion to accept your kind and friendly offer of coming here,’ and reported that his pulse had been found to have been weaker than it should be and ‘beating near an hundred’, but the treatment he had been prescribed seemed ‘already to have had a very good effect’.47 He apparently remained in good humour throughout, although Canning wrote on 20 December: ‘I think he is weak beyond what he ought to be & business quite overpowers him.’48

  As he strove to recover his health, Pitt knew that the fate of Europe hung in the balance. He could not have been aware that before he had set out for Bath that fate had already been decided. Even without the involvement of the Prussians, Napoleon faced the prospects of a junction of two large Russian and Austrian armies. By mid-December rumours were reaching London of a great engagement, and it was thought to have been a successful one. A Treasury Minister, William Huskisson, writing to Pitt on 19 December, expressed the hope that ‘the news received to-day is sufficiently authentic to justify my congratulating you on the favourable prospect it opens’.49

  In fact, Tsar Alexander and the Emperor Francis had advanced towards Napoleon as innocents to the slaughter. Knowing he was outnumbered and desperate to bring on a battle before his opponents could come together, Napoleon had used every trick in his extensive book to lull them into thinking he was retreating. As a result they placed their armies in an exposed position: a combination of French tactical retreats, forced marches and sudden counterattacks onto high ground left the Austrian and Russian armies on 2 December in a shockingly inferior position. What would be known to history as the Battle of Austerlitz lasted little more than ten hours. At the end of it the Austrian and Russian armies had been destroyed as effective fighting forces: one third of their numbers were killed, wounded or captured, and the rest were in headlong retreat. Within four days Austria had capitulated; its surrender involved the ceding of large territories to Napoleon: Venetia, Dalmatia and Istria. The German Princes who had su
pported Napoleon were recognised as Kings. The Russians withdrew into Poland and the Prussians abandoned all immediate thoughts of entering the war. As a result, the British expedition building up its strength in north Germany would be left exposed. Pitt had laboured for eighteen months to assemble the Third Coalition. At Austerlitz Napoleon destroyed it in a single day. Reports of the catastrophe began to appear in London newspapers on 29 December. As Pitt began to worry about a fresh deterioration in his health on 1 January 1806, the despatches winging their way towards him would confirm the ruin of all his hopes.

  28

  ‘How I Leave My Country’

  ‘… I have done too much. When in conversation with persons upon important business, I felt suddenly as if I had been cut in two.’

  WILLIAM PITT, 13 JANUARY 18061

  ‘There was something missing in the world – a chasm, a blank that cannot be supplied.’

  CHARLES JAMES FOX, ON HEARING OF THE DEATH OF PITT, JANUARY 18062

  WE CANNOT KNOW FOR SURE whether the news of the Battle of Austerlitz and the collapse of the Third Coalition accelerated the death of William Pitt. Many who knew him well certainly thought that it did. According to George Rose, ‘on receiving the account of the armistice after Austerlitz the gout quitted the extremities, and he fell into a debility which continually increased’.3 Wilberforce considered that the news broke Pitt’s heart, ‘and the accounts from the armies struck a death blow within’.4

  To a man who was already as sick as he had ever been, and who was prone to ‘every public event of importance’ producing a ‘corresponding effect upon the body’, no news could have been worse, for most of the things Pitt cared about – country, government, and indeed his own position and power – were suddenly and simultaneously placed in danger. The disappointment was all the greater for coming about by such a narrow margin. According to Harrowby, the Prussian army had been ‘so far engaged’ that without ‘the unfortunate Battle of Austerlitz’ it would ‘have advanced rapidly and all might have been saved’.5 It was the tragic culmination of thirteen years in which each resurgence of hope for the war on the Continent had been followed by comprehensive defeat. Pitt’s great misfortune was that strategies which would have been highly likely to succeed in earlier wars did not work against French armies which had been fired up by revolution and were now led by Napoleon. This defeat, even though it did not involve a single British soldier, was the most serious of all.

  Castlereagh arrived in Bath on 3 January 1806 with the bleak and authoritative official accounts of events on the Continent. Although at this stage there was still room to hope that Prussia and Russia could act together, news would soon follow that the Prussian Minister, Count Haugwitz, had signed an agreement with Napoleon on 15 December which secured Hanover for the Prussian Crown. There was nothing left to cushion the blow. Canning’s letter to Pitt on New Year’s Eve ended disconsolately with: ‘I hate to walk the streets in such ill news.’6

  To even the most robust of Ministers such news would have come as a crushing disappointment. It would have been impossible to contemplate with anything other than dread the opening of Parliament set for only three weeks later – and already once postponed – when opposition forces which almost equalled those of the government would inevitably try to overturn Pitt’s administration. What is more, they would have five or six exhausting months in which to do it, during which failure must once again be courageously defended, and evidence of hope once again scraped from an almost empty barrel. The country was not in danger of invasion – Trafalgar had seen to that – but it was hard to see any means by which French domination of Europe could be resisted. Any success at all would require still greater raising of manpower and levying of taxes. For Pitt, there was therefore nothing to look forward to.

  Austerlitz may well have broken Pitt’s spirit. Yet it is also clear that he had not been getting better as he should have done, and as he was accustomed to, for some time before the dreadful news. There had been no consistent improvement in his health in the days before he heard of Austerlitz, and the deterioration over the two weeks afterwards was only gradual. Years later, Wellington denied that the bad news from the Continent caused Pitt’s death, and asserted that his health was in any case ‘destroyed by long and previous exertions in the House of Commons, and by deluging his stomach with port wine and water, which he drank to excess, in order to give a false and artificial stimulus to his nervous system’.7

  For a time, he continued neither better nor worse, although steadily weaker and thinner from eating so little for some weeks. Farquhar joined him at Bath on 4 January and ‘was very much shocked at his appearance’. Pitt ‘was much emaciated, very weak, feeble, and low … He attempted to join the Dinner Table, which at length he did with great difficulty. He eat [sic] very little, but drank some Madeira & Water as had been his usual custom.’8 That Pitt was depressed is clear from his letter to Melville of 3 January, in which he expressed his frustration about the Austrian armistice and the Russian retreat: ‘It is the more provoking, because subsequent to the action the allied army is stated to have been still 85,000 strong.’9 Three days later he wrote a characteristically methodical and businesslike letter to Castlereagh on the difficult question of what should now be done with the British troops in Germany: ‘I certainly feel a strong desire to see so valuable a body of troops at home; but … By bringing them away now, I fear we should hardly give a fair chance to the good disposition of Prussia.’10 At the same time he had to acknowledge that he was genuinely sick, and unlikely to be well for the opening of Parliament: ‘I am sorry to say that I have more ground to gain, before I am fit for anything, that I can almost hope to accomplish within a fortnight. Bath is no longer thought of use, and I shall move as soon as I can.’11

  Pitt was determined at least to be near London, the better to manage the parliamentary situation. While Farquhar and the other doctors debated whether he should be moved, the patient seems to have been fairly insistent, and they decided that ‘his own anxiety for the measure would have rendered it absolutely expedient’.12 Farquhar noted that Pitt was now ‘a man much worn out. One day his eyes were almost lifeless, & another his voice hollow & weak, while his pulse was remarkably weak, & generally from 100 to 120.’13 If Pitt was to survive at all, it is probable that his only hope of sustained recovery was complete rest, mental as well as physical; but that he would not obtain. He insisted on speeding what was meant to have been a slow journey to London, heading for his house at Putney and not taking up the many offers of accommodation which flowed from Canning, Camden and Hawkesbury.

  Leaving Bath on 9 January, where a silent crowd watched him leave Johnson Street, Pitt refused to make the planned overnight stop at Chippenham and decided to carry on to Marlborough. Accompanied by Farquhar and Charles Stanhope, he managed to eat a little, and the next day disregarded the possibility of stopping at Newbury in order to carry on to Reading. After one further stop on the afternoon of Saturday, 11 January at Salt Hill, a few miles north of Windsor, a further two hours’ travelling saw him back at home in Putney Heath. On arrival there, he is said to have made the melancholy remark, upon seeing a map of Europe, ‘Roll up that map, it will not be needed these next ten years,’ although whether he did so cannot be established reliably. Pitt seems to have regarded himself at this point as being in an extended state of convalescence. On the twelfth he would write to his long-standing friend Marquis Wellesley (formerly Lord Mornington, who had just returned from the governing of India, and brother of the future Duke of Wellington) that he was ‘recovering rather slowly from a series of stomach complaints’, but believed he was ‘now in the way of real amendment’.14

  By contrast, Farquhar was becoming extremely anxious. Dining with Malmesbury on the night of the tenth while Pitt slept at Reading, he said that ‘Pitt was emaciated so as not to be known, and nothing could save him but complete and entire rest; that any exertion, mental or bodily, would infallibly kill him.’15 Farquhar would later write in his own
defence that he ‘most earnestly entreated’ Pitt not to proceed to Putney Heath ‘from the apprehension of the business in which he might be involved by his proximity to London’. He repeated his ‘conviction of the indispensable necessity there was of Mr. Pitt’s retiring from Public Life, at least for a time’. Pitt, however, ‘declared his resolution of proceeding & submitting to the consequences, whatever they might be’.16

  Trying to keep Pitt away from work as much as possible, Farquhar arranged for Pretyman to take up residence in Pitt’s house and act once again as his private secretary. He prevailed on Pitt ‘to give me a pledge that he would open no Letters, and attend to no business’, and would let Pretyman manage his correspondence. Thus Pitt was installed in his own house with Pretyman to hand, along with Lady Hester Stanhope and her half-brothers Charles and, later, James. Medical treatment was supervised by Farquhar with the assistance of two of the leading doctors of the time, Henry Reynolds and Mathew Baillie.

  Pitt had now lost a great deal of weight. Lady Hester Stanhope was shocked by his appearance: ‘I said to myself, “It is all over with him.” He was supported by the arms of two people, and had a stick, or two sticks, in his hands, and as he came up, panting for breath … I retreated, little by little, not to put him to the pain of making a bow to me, or of speaking.’17 Pretyman recalled that ‘his countenance was totally changed, his eyes were lifeless and his voice was hollow’.18 Even so, Pitt felt well enough to be taken out for ‘an airing’ in his carriage on the Sunday, and ‘expressed himself much satisfied with his amendment’.19 In spite of everything, he seemed determined to bear up, and William Dacres Adams had been hugely impressed in the preceding days by the ‘wonderful fortitude with which he bore such a mental and bodily pull upon his nearly exhausted powers’.20