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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.’

THE EARL OF CHATHAM TO JOSEPH TURNER OF PEMBROKE COLLEGE¹

‘He was always the most lively person in company, abounding in playful wit and quick repartee; but never known to excite pain, or to give just ground of offence.’

BISHOP TOMLINE²

FOR A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD to be admitted as an undergraduate to Cambridge University was highly unusual in the eighteenth century, just as it would be today. A sample of undergraduate admissions to Pembroke Hall in the twenty years preceding Pitt’s arrival there suggests that fewer than one in five of them were even under eighteen.³ Yet Chatham and the assiduous tutor Edward Wilson had evidently decided that William could cope with a college environment in spite of his youth and continued illnesses. Since Wilson was a graduate of Pembroke Hall (later Pembroke College), Cambridge, and his brother was presently a Fellow there, it was decided that this would be the most suitable place for William to go. His name was entered into the college admissions book on 26 April 1773. Wilson was highly confident of the new student’s prospects: ‘He will go to Pembroke not a weak boy to be made a property of, but to be admir’d as a prodigy; not to hear lectures, but to spread light.’⁴

Wilson and Pitt travelled from Somerset to Cambridge together in October 1773, a journey which took them five days. When they arrived, Pitt immediately wrote an excited letter to his father:

I have the pleasure of writing to my dear father, after having breakfasted upon College rolls, and made some acquaintance with my new quarters which seem, on the short examination I have given, neat and convenient …

To make out our five days, we took the road by Binfield, and called in upon Mr. Wilson’s curate there; who soon engaged with his rector in a most vehement controversy, and supported his opinions with Ciceronian action and flaming eyes … We slept last night at Barkway, where we learnt that Pembroke was a sober, staid college, and nothing but solid study there. I find, indeed, we are to be grave in apparel, as even a silver button is not allowed to sparkle along our quadrangles, &c.; so that my hat is soon to be stripped of its glories, in exchange for a plain loop and button.⁵

The ‘neat and convenient quarters’ were a set of rooms over the Senior Parlour where Thomas Gray had lived for many years. After that they had been occupied by Wilson’s brother, who was now vacating them to travel abroad. These rooms were spacious and well inside the college, away from any noise or bustle in the road.^*

Much as the fourteen-year-old was already fascinated by events around the globe, he was still living in a small world. At that time there were about fifty undergraduates at Pembroke, and a good deal fewer than a thousand in the whole university, which could be traversed on foot in less than fifteen minutes. The main subjects of study were Classical Literature, Moral Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Natural History, Medicine, Theology and Mathematics. For his first three years, Pitt played no part in the life of the university outside the Pembroke walls. He was one of eight Fellow Commoners in the college, sons of noblemen who paid higher fees and ate at the Fellows’ table rather than with others of the same age. The relationship between a tutor and a student was often far closer than is usual today, frequently with long continuity and daily tutorials in a far smaller community. Once again Pitt was to spend most of his time conversing with adults rather than with other teenagers.

Within a week of his arrival Pitt was writing to his father to report that he was already studying Quintilian and that the Master of the College, Dr Brown, had taken a special interest in him. He was conscious, as always, of being his father’s son, expressing the hope ‘that I may be, on some future day, worthy to follow, in part, the glorious example always before my eyes’.⁶ Two weeks later he had fallen ill again and his father was urging him to work less hard: ‘You have time to spare: consider there is but the Encyclopaedia; and when you have mastered all that, what will remain? You will want, like Alexander, another world to conquer.’⁷ By then, however, the damage was already done, and his illness was sufficiently serious to cause alarm in the college and among his family, with the family nurse Mrs Sparry being sent to stay with him in his rooms. He was confined there for two months and then brought home until the summer of the following year. He was preceded home by a letter from the Master: ‘notwithstanding his illness, I have myself seen, and have heard enough from his tutors, to be convinced both of his extraordinary genius and most amiable disposition … I hope he will return safe to his parents, and that we shall receive him again in a better and more confirmed state of health.’⁸

Pitt was so ill that it is said to have taken four days to transport him from Cambridge to Hayes, a journey which ought to have been possible in one day. Back in the bosom of his family, he was referred to the attentions of his father’s physician, Dr Addington, the father of Henry Addington who was to become Pitt’s friend and, in 1801, his successor as Prime Minister. It was at this point that Pitt received the famous piece of medical advice that may have influenced his social habits throughout the rest of his life and quite possibly contributed, three decades later, to his early death. Dr Addington recommended going to bed early, and ending the habit of studying classical literature into the night. He also recommended a specific diet, and regular daily exercise on horseback. His final recommendation was to drink a daily quantity of port wine, variously recollected down the generations as ‘a bottle a day’ or ‘liberal potations’, but at any rate a good deal of it. While this sounds surprising today, medical opinion of the time was that a regular infusion of alcohol could drive other less welcome toxins to disperse in the body and hopefully disappear. Pitt, methodical as ever, took all of this advice and continued to adhere to most of it throughout his life, particularly the requirement to ride and to drink port. He can be forgiven for thinking that this combination was healthy for him, since it was from this point in his adolescence that he enjoyed a substantial improvement in his health and finally shook off the debilitating complaints that had plagued him as a child.

Nevertheless, it was not until July 1774 that he returned to Cambridge, the devoted Edward Wilson still at his side. For the next two years his life fell into a pattern in which he spent the summer in Cambridge, when of course many other members of the college would be absent, and the winters with his family so that his health could be more closely attended to. In those winter months he was again under the close tutelage of his father. A letter of January 1775 from Chatham to his wife begins, ‘William and I, being deep in work for the state’, suggesting that political discussion continued apace between father and son.⁹ In his Cambridge sojourns, Pitt now became more relaxed and at ease. He took trouble to assure his father that he was no longer working at night, and gave many accounts of riding, in accordance with the doctor’s instructions, in the vicinity of Cambridge. In July 1774, on his return, he wrote, ‘I have this morning, for the first time, mounted my horse, and was accompanied by Mr. Wilson, on his beautiful carthorse,’ and ‘Nutmeg performs admirably. Even the solid shoulders of Peacock are not without admirers; and they have jogged Mr. Wilson into tolerable health and spirits; though at first the salutary exercise had an effect that, for some time, prevented his pursuing it. The rides in the neighbourhood afford nothing striking, but, at the same time are not unpleasing, when one is a little used to a flat open country.’¹⁰ By the end of August, the now much healthier fifteen-year-old seemed fully content and settled in. He wrote to his father, ‘Mr. Turner, with whom I read the first part of the time I have been here, is now absent, and Mr. Pretyman supplies his place. During the interval of a day or two before the arrival of the latter, the Master read with me some part of Cicero De Senectute; of which he is a great admirer. He is in every respect as obliging as possible. Altogether, by the help of riding, reading, the newspapers, &c. time is past away very agreeably.’¹¹

The arrival of Dr George Pretyman as Pitt’s tutor presaged a lifelong friendship of deep mutual loyalty. Pretyman was the junior Fellow at Pembroke and he became Pitt’s principal tutor and mentor. With him, Pitt continued the practice of contemporaneous translation of classical texts which he had started with his father. Pretyman (later known as Tomline after an inheritance) was only eight years older than Pitt himself, and it is clear they spent a great deal of time together. As we shall see, he went on to be an unofficial aide to Pitt in his early years as Prime Minister, always remained a close friend and adviser, and was with him when he died in 1806. Pitt would reward him in 1787 by making him Bishop of Lincoln, and was only thwarted by the determination of George III from making him Archbishop of Canterbury in 1805.

Pretyman’s Life of Pitt has been excoriated for being of little literary or political merit and for tragically failing to give any private insights into Pitt’s character, with which he must have been extremely familiar. But it is possible to glean from the book a little of what Pitt’s life was like between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. ‘While Mr. Pitt was under-graduate, he never omitted attending chapel morning and evening, or dining in the public hall, except when prevented by indisposition. Nor did he pass a single evening out of the college walls. Indeed, most of his time was spent with me.’¹² In the course of several years ‘I never knew him spend an idle day; nor did he ever fail to attend me at the appointed hour.’¹³ As Pitt’s tutor, Pretyman was enormously impressed by the talents of his pupil who, having exhausted all the principal Greek and Latin texts, requested that they study the little-known rhapsody of Lycophron. This he read ‘with an ease at first sight, which, if I had not witnessed it, I should have thought beyond the compass of human intellect’.¹⁴

Pretyman taught Pitt alternate sessions of Classics and Mathematics. The eager pupil excelled in both fields, and continued to give particular attention to speaking styles. ‘When alone, he dwelt for hours upon striking passages of an orator or historian, in noticing their turn of expression, in marking their manner of arranging a narrative … A few pages sometimes occupied a whole morning … He was also in the habit of copying any eloquent sentence, or any beautiful or forcible expression, which occurred in his reading.’¹⁵ The focus of Pitt’s learning was therefore narrow, but always practical and invariably intense. He showed very little interest in contemporary literature, European languages (although he developed a working knowledge of French) or the wave of French philosophical writing pouring forth at the time. There is no evidence that he spent a single day reflecting on theology, despite the fact that a very large proportion of his fellow students would have been preparing for a career in the Church, a path to which his close friend and tutor was also inclined. His intellectual diversions from Classics and Mathematics extended at a later stage to attending lectures in Civil Law, with the Bar in his mind as a stopgap or supplement to politics. He always had a thirst for information about public affairs in the wider world. Even in 1773, before his arrival in Cambridge, we find him writing to a Mr Johnson, ‘Can you tell whether Governor Hutchinson’s speech to the General assembly at Boston together with their answer and his reply again have been yet published together? If they have will you send them down.’¹⁶

Pitt had a very clear sense of what facts he wanted to know and which subjects he wanted to study, and was happy to leave aside fields of theoretical discussion which preoccupied many of his contemporaries. It is impossible to escape the very simple conclusion that throughout his teens he was consciously preparing for a career at the forefront of politics, and, certain of what was required from the close observation of his father, directed his studies to that end.

It may be thought from all of this that Pitt must have been dry and dull from a social point of view, but all who knew him are adamant that this was not the case. It was at this stage, at the age of seventeen in 1776, that his daily life began to broaden out and for the first time he developed his own circle of friends. He took his Master of Arts degree without an examination, as he was entitled to do as the son of a nobleman. He had intended to sit the examinations for a Bachelor of Arts degree but was prevented by his failure to attend for sufficient terms to qualify. This did not mean, however, that he would now leave Cambridge. He had at last been able to find friends approximating to his own age, and was freer to go about to other colleges and, increasingly, on short trips to London. Possibly conscious of how little he had experienced the life of the university in his first three years, and still being too young to do anything else, he decided to stay in residence at Pembroke for the time being, albeit moving rooms in 1777 when the previous occupant of his original set returned.

He was not slow in making friends, and now laid the foundations of many lifelong relationships. His close friends included Edward Eliot, who later became his brother-in-law, lived with him in Downing Street and was a member of the Board of the Treasury; Lord Westmorland, later Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Lord Privy Seal; William Meeke, later Clerk of the Parliament in Dublin and an MP; Lord Granby, later Duke of Rutland, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in Pitt’s first administration, and instrumental in getting him into Parliament; J.C. Villiers, later a member of the Board of Trade; Henry Bankes, later a supportive MP for many years; John Pratt, later Lord Camden and a member of Pitt’s governments; and Lord Euston, who became MP for Cambridge University alongside Pitt. It is easy to imagine a brilliant young man such as Pitt, holder of a famous political name, exploding into the company of such a talented and politically motivated group. Pretyman tells us: ‘He was always the most lively person in company, abounding in playful wit and quick repartee; but never known to excite pain, or to give just ground of offence … Though his society was universally sought, and from the age of seventeen or eighteen he constantly passed his evenings in company, he steadily avoided every species of irregularity.’¹⁷ Whether by inclination, calculation, or awareness of so many eyes being upon the son of Chatham, Pitt was careful as a teenager to do nothing which would disgrace his family or return to haunt him. In any case, he had no need of excesses to make him popular with his peers. William Wilberforce, part of a more dissolute set at Cambridge at the time but later to become another lifelong friend, referred to his ‘distinctive peculiarity that he was not carried away by his own wit, though he could at any time command its exercise, and no man, perhaps, at proper seasons ever indulged more freely or happily in that playful facetiousness which gratifies all without wounding any’.¹⁸

Pitt’s Cambridge friends, then, provided lively company and intellectual stimulation, and while not subject to many vices undoubtedly drank a good deal of port together. They were, however, all of a type, generally the sons of noblemen, and all familiar with politics and classics. Pitt was friendly and charming in their company, but he gained no experience in dealing with other types of people in other situations. The latitudinarian and Newtonian influences on Cambridge at the time emphasised the power of reason, and Pitt would have met far fewer people who were impervious to rational persuasion than would have been the case elsewhere.

He would have encountered very few women indeed, and certainly none at all on equal terms or in any intellectual environment. Nor did he have to cope with the company of people not of his choosing. It may have been because of his Grenville starchiness or it may partly have been the result of his education in the cloistered atmosphere of his home and college that Pitt was to be known throughout his life as aloof, difficult and sometimes haughty towards most people he met. The pattern of his character was now set: a brilliant and tireless interest in practical questions, a tremendously relaxed and talkative enjoyment of chosen company, and a stern face presented to the outer world.

Outside the college dining rooms inhabited by Pitt and his friends, life in the city of Cambridge would have looked and sounded very much as it had done for many decades. The first paved street in the city appeared in 1788, some years after Pitt left Pembroke, and gas lighting did not follow until 1823, well after his death. Yet as the 1770s drew to a close the Britain beyond the walls of Oxbridge colleges was on the brink of a social and economic transformation which even the brilliant Cambridge graduates gathering to discuss public affairs could not possibly have foreseen. In the coming years they would have to respond to it, and their lives and careers would be increasingly shaped and buffeted by it.

War has always been a spur to invention, and the Seven Years’ War was no exception. The invention of the spinning jenny in 1764 and improvements upon it in the following years brought about a revolution in the cotton industry and British manufacturing. That revolution gathered pace as Pitt studied his books at Cambridge, and was to become a mighty engine of economic growth throughout his political career. Cotton exports from Britain were £200,000 in 1764, and had risen to £355,000 by 1780, but had rocketed to £9,753,000 by the time of Pitt’s death in 1806, going on to form nearly half of total British exports.¹⁹

The use of coal and coke in iron production was also getting under way, further transformed by the use of steam engines and blast furnaces from 1790. This was the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and it would bring huge changes in the demography of Britain. By 1800, the great cities of manufacturing and trade such as Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds and Bristol would dwarf the previously largest cities (other than London) such as Norwich, Exeter and York. London was, and would remain, the largest city in the British Isles, but at the end of the eighteenth century many of what are today its central districts were still villages surrounded by fields. A German visitor, Carl Moritz, wrote of the view from the top of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1782: ‘beneath me lay a packed mass of towers, houses and palaces, with the London squares – their green lawns in their midst – adding pleasant splashes of colour in between. At one end of the Thames stood the Tower of London, like a city with a forest of masts behind it; at the other lay Westminster Abbey lifting up its towers. The green hills skirting the Paddington and Islington districts smiled at me from afar while nearer by lay Southwark on the opposite bank of the Thames.’²⁰ At this stage St James’s Park was ‘nothing more than a semi-circular avenue of trees enclosing a large area of greensward in the midst of which is a swampy pond. Cows feed on the turf and you may buy their milk quite freshly drawn from the animal.’^21*

We do not know whether the future politicians gathered around the young Pitt discussed the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, but the ingredients were present all around them. Agricultural productivity was rising much faster than in neighbouring France, as farm sizes increased and the population began to move to the cities. Coal output in 1775 was already nearly three times what it had been in 1700. The growth of the cotton industry and trade with the expanding Empire provided new employment on a huge scale. Population growth, facilitated by the availability of food and work, started to accelerate, with the population of England growing from five and a half million to seven million between 1751 and 1781. By 1841 it would reach fifteen million.²² The transport system was beginning to improve, with the canals undergoing expansion to link manufacturing centres and ports, and turnpike roads growing rapidly from 1750 onwards.

The huge expansion and movements of population would create immense political and social strains, but at the time of Pitt’s Cambridge education these trends had yet to gather their full momentum. It would undoubtedly have seemed in the 1770s that such changes as were happening could be safely accommodated within the existing political and economic order. The real explosion of agricultural and manufacturing production and export growth took place after 1780, just as Pitt entered Parliament, when in a twenty-year period the proportion of national output exported rose from 9 per cent to 16 per cent even while a war of unprecedented intensity was raging. Pitt and his colleagues in government would face the challenge of coping with economic change on a scale never witnessed before, and at a time when that change was unpredictable and uneven. They would also be the last generation to conduct the business of the nation without the advantage of the dramatic advances in travel and communications which were also on the way.

Although Pitt, on his increasing forays to the capital, would find it possible in the late 1770s to eat breakfast in London and dinner (generally taken in the late afternoon) in Cambridge, road travel was still an arduous business. It was not practical at this time, nor would it be for some decades, to make a tour even of a country as small as England without spending weeks or months doing so and being incommunicado for part of the time. As a result, Pitt in office would rarely stray north of Northampton or west of Weymouth. When William Wilberforce rushed to a crisis public meeting in York in 1795, taking less than forty-eight hours to make the journey from Westminster, it was regarded as an extraordinary achievement, made possible only by extra teams of horses as well as outriders to clear people from the last twenty miles of the route. Within fifty years, he could have done it in nine hours on the train. The fact that advances in communications came later than a great deal of other economic change would limit the ability of politicians to understand what was happening and to respond to it quickly.

Throughout the whole of this period all orders and correspondence dealing with a burgeoning national economy and war on a global scale would have to be conveyed by letter carried by a despatch rider on a horse, or on board ship. The complications this entailed for international diplomacy would be unimaginable today. Wars could be declared while peace proposals were still on their way from a foreign capital. A message sent by sea did not necessarily travel faster than a fleet. In 1762, when the Seven Years’ War widened into conflict between Britain and Spain, the enterprising British Admiralty sent a message to British forces in India to set off immediately to attack the Spanish colony in Manila in the Philippines. Arriving seven months after the original message had been sent from London, the British achieved the ultimate surprise attack, since word had still not arrived from Madrid that war had been declared at all. Their ships sailed under the Spanish defenders’ guns unchallenged before launching their successful assault. In the Nootka Sound crisis of 1790, the interval between events on the ground on the west coast of North America and a response from London could be anything up to a full year. It is therefore vital to remember that governments of this period, including Pitt’s administrations, were often groping in the dark when dealing with war or disorder, guessing at events, and trying to remember to err on the side of caution. This would not help them to cope with the convulsions which would shake the world in their lifetimes.

The first of these convulsions, and one which ranked high in the conversations of Pitt and his friends, was already taking place in the 1770s. In 1775 the diverging interests of Britain and the thirteen American colonies exploded into war, and Pitt’s letters of the time are peppered with requests for news, information and documents relating to it. The repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 had made Chatham a hero across the Atlantic, with statues of him erected in American towns, but ironically it was Chatham’s own victories that paved the way for this further and disastrous conflict. With the French cleared from Canada, the colonies had much less need of Britain to protect them. Instead, they found British commitments to Indian tribes getting in the way of the territorial expansion to the west which a rapidly growing American population now sought. And the emerging British Empire was now so vast and varied that the interests of one colony could be entirely different from the interests of the whole. When the British government reduced the duties on the export of tea to North America, it was meant to be excellent news for the troubled finances of the East India Company, but it was disastrous for the lucrative smuggling trade in Massachusetts. The result was the Boston Tea Party and, several years later, open conflict.

British political opinion was deeply divided over the developing war in America, but few in London would have doubted the capacity of Britain to bring the recalcitrant colonies to heel. The 350 ships and 25,000 soldiers assembled in America by the early summer of 1776 in the name of the King constituted an awesome display of military power. Yet they were to find, like the Americans themselves two centuries later in Vietnam, that regular troops fighting by conventional methods in vast, impenetrable terrain could win most of the battles but still not win the war.

Chatham, in his dying years, and after some time in which he took no part in politics, made three celebrated visits to the House of Lords to thunder against the folly of British policy. As Macaulay put it in his brilliant essay on Pitt, ‘Chatham was only the ruin of [the elder] Pitt, but an awful and majestic ruin, not to be contemplated by any man of sense and feeling without emotions resembling those which are excited by the remains of the Parthenon and of the Colosseum.’²³ In 1775 he called for conciliation of the colonies: ‘We shall be forced ultimately to retract; let us retract while we can not when we must.’ His son sat transfixed in the Gallery of the Lords, and his letter to his mother shows how he was now applying his judgement of classical speeches to contemporary debaters:

Nothing prevented his [Chatham’s] speech from being the most forcible that can be imagined … The matter and manner both were striking; far beyond what I can express … Lord Suffolk, I cannot say answered him … He was a contemptible orator indeed, with paltry matter and a whining delivery. Lord Shelburne spoke well … Lord Camden was supreme … Lord Rockingham spoke shortly but sensibly; and the Duke of Richmond well … Upon the whole, it was a noble debate.²⁴

On the second occasion, Chatham presciently warned that the war would soon widen into conflict with France and Spain, insisting on the need to make immediate peace with America. Once again, an excited son was in the Gallery:

I cannot help expressing to you how happy beyond description I feel in reflecting that my father was able to exert, in their full vigour, the sentiments and eloquence which have always distinguished him. His first speech took up half an hour, and was full of all his usual force and vivacity … He spoke a second time … This he did in a flow of eloquence, and with a beauty of expression, animated and striking beyond conception.²⁵

Chatham’s warnings went unheeded; strategic mistakes contributed to a serious British defeat at Saratoga, followed by rejoicing in Paris and the entry of France and later Spain and Holland into the war. The tired and dispirited head of the government, Lord North, asked George III for permission to resign and to sound out Chatham on the terms on which he would form a government. Not only did the King refuse, referring to Chatham as that ‘perfidious man’, but Chatham was now on his last legs. Against the advice of his doctors, he went to the House of Lords on 17 April 1778, entering the Chamber supported on the shoulders of William and his son-in-law, Lord Mahon. Dramatically, the entire House of Lords rose to greet him. It is hard to imagine that William Pitt ever forgot the poignancy of this moment and its illustration of the greatness of his father. Chatham’s voice was weak, and he was almost unable to stand; at times his speech wandered, but his message was clear: now the war had been widened it was too late to sue for peace. ‘Shall this great kingdom … fall prostrate before the House of Bourbon? … Shall a people that fifteen years ago was the terror of the world now stoop so low as to tell its ancient inveterate enemy, “Take all we have, only give us peace”. In God’s name … Let us at least make one effort; and if we must fall, let us fall like men!’²⁶ He sat down exhausted, and trying to rise to speak for a second time, fell backwards unable to do any more, a moment immortalised in Copley’s famous painting, as his sons John and William rushed to his aid. He was taken to Downing Street, then two days later to Hayes, and died on 11 May. The role of chief mourner at his father’s funeral the following month became Pitt’s first public duty.