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Pitt the young idealist was not put off by this lofty discouragement, and commenced his canvassing.^* He busied himself writing to acquaintances around the university, ‘I rely on the support of my own College and my musical friends, both which characters, I hope prejudice you in my favour.’¹⁵ But in the event there was to be no election in 1779. In early 1780 Pitt was still sitting in the Gallery of the Commons watching the debates of the same Parliament, the North administration still battling on. His letters exulted in seeing the government defeated several times: ‘What the consequence will be, cannot be guessed, but I have no ideas of Ministry being able to stand.’¹⁶ He watched excitedly as Edmund Burke – ‘I had no Idea till now of his Excellence’¹⁷ – brought in his sweeping proposals for economical reform, seeking to abolish the special royal jurisdictions in Wales, Cheshire, Lancaster and Cornwall, to reduce the Civil List through which money was provided to the King, and to abolish the offices of Master of the Household, Treasurer, Comptroller, Cofferer, the Board of the Green-Cloth, the Wardrobe Office, the Jewel Office, the Keepers of Stag Hounds, Buck Hounds, Fox Hounds, and many other Crown offices. A Bill was introduced to exclude government contractors from being Members of Parliament, along with the presentation of damning evidence of their greed and inefficiency. At last major reform seemed in the offing.

Yet Pitt also watched as one by one Burke’s proposals were watered down and then abandoned, and as the much-vaunted Contractors Bill was crushed in the House of Lords. He watched Lord North take on the chin the famous motion condemning the influence of the Crown, and then render it meaningless by defeating a motion asking the King not to dissolve Parliament until the influence of the Crown at elections had been diminished. Pitt learnt the lesson, one he would not forget as he led a government facing a hostile House of Commons only four years later, that even a government assailed on all sides can tough it out for a time if it sticks together and has the solid support of the King. And he soon learnt a second lesson: a government working with the King could spring a nasty surprise.

Parliament rose in mid-August after a long and exhausting session. No sooner had opposition politicians relaxed into their summer watering holes than, on 1 September, George III agreed to North’s request that Parliament be dissolved and an immediate general election announced. With the opposition surprised and disorganised, opinion backing the government against the recent Gordon Riots, and the Treasury’s money doing its work in marginal cases, the North administration was confident of broadly maintaining its majority. By now Pitt had secured the support of the Earl of Shelburne, who led a small band of parliamentarians still loyal to the memory of Chatham. He wrote an effusive letter of thanks, saying he was ‘truly sensible of this fresh instance of that friendly assistance which our family has eminently experienced from your Lordship’.¹⁸ When the election was called, Pitt rushed to Cambridge, but his contest was hopeless. On 16 September it was announced that he had come bottom of the poll of five candidates, the two seats for Cambridge University being won by a sitting Member who supported the government and a previous runner-up who was a strong follower of Rockingham. Pitt had been squeezed out. He wrote philosophically to his mother:

Pemb. Hall, Sept. 16 [1780),

My dear Mother,

Mansfield and Townshend have run away with the Prize, but my struggle has not been dishonourable.

I am just going to Cheveley [the seat of the Duke of Rutland] for a day or two, and shall soon return to you for as long as the law will permit, which will now be probably the sole object with me. I hope you are all well.

Your ever dutiful and affectionate

W. Pitt¹⁹

It was not an easy autumn for the family. Pitt’s sister Hester had never fully recovered from the birth of her third child in February. She died in July. Over the next few years Pitt and his bereaved brother-in-law Lord Mahon would become close friends, but this was a sad time made even worse by the news the following year that the youngest brother, James, had died on naval service in the West Indies at the end of 1780. Pitt wrote to Pretyman: ‘I have to regret the loss of a brother who had every thing that was most amiable and promising, every thing that I could love and admire; and I feel the favourite hope of my mind extinguished by this untimely blow. Let me however, assure you, that I am too much tried in affliction not to be able to support myself under it; and that my poor mother and sister, to whom I brought the sad account yesterday, have not suffered in their health, from so severe a shock.’²⁰

With the death of Earl Temple the previous year, Pitt’s mother had now lost in rapid succession her husband, elder brother, eldest daughter and youngest son. After Hester’s death William spent time at Hayes or Burton Pynsent with his mother, and at other times kept up his flow of excited and informative letters. By November 1780 he could report at last that he would be a Member of Parliament. His Cambridge friend Lord Granby had now succeeded his grandfather as Duke of Rutland. Wanting to see Pitt in Parliament as soon as possible, he approached his friend Sir James Lowther, who controlled a number of boroughs in the north of England. As Lowther’s cousin William had been returned in the election for both Appleby and Carlisle and chose to sit for the latter, Lowther needed a new Member for Appleby. Such rearrangements in the few months after a general election were entirely customary in the eighteenth century. Lowther had a reputation as a rather dominating patron, but he was prepared to lift any normal conditions for the son of Chatham. Pitt wrote to his mother:

Lincoln’s Inn, Thursday night [November 1780]

My dear Mother,

I can now inform you that I have seen Sir J. Lowther, who has repeated to me the offer He had before made, and in the handsomest manner. Judging from my Father’s Principles, He concludes that mine would be agreeable to his own, and on that Ground, to me of all others the most agreeable desires to bring me in. No Kind of Condition was mentioned, but that if ever our Lines of Conduct should become opposite, I should give Him an opportunity of choosing another Person. On such Liberal Terms I could certainly not hesitate to accept the proposal, than which Nothing could be in any respect more agreeable. Appleby is the Place I am to represent, and the Election will be made (probably in a week or Ten days) without my having any trouble, or even visiting my constituents.²¹

The offer from Lowther was liberal enough to provide Pitt with freedom of action unless he completely reversed his political stance. William Pitt, aged twenty-one, was now a Member of Parliament.

^*Assessments of inflation over such long periods are at best approximate. In this book any illustrations of the present-day value of money in Pitt’s time are based on the index agreed in 2003 by the House of Commons Library, the Bank of England and the Office of National Statistics.

^*The Pantheon, on Oxford Street to the east of Oxford Circus, was a prominent venue for concerts and dances and was described by Horace Walpole as ‘the most beautiful edifice in England’. Today the site is occupied by a store of Marks & Spencer.

^*Cambridge and Oxford Universities had two Members each. The University Members were finally abolished in 1948.

^*The franchise in the universities was based on membership of the University Senate, and was thus possessed only by academics. These constituencies were also unusual in having a secret ballot. The electorate of Cambridge University was a little over seven hundred strong in the early 1780s.

4 Brilliant Beginnings

‘He was the wittiest man I ever knew, and what was quite peculiar to himself, had at all times his wit under entire control.’

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE ON WILLIAM PITT

‘It is a most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust and diabolical war … Where is the Englishman who on reading the narrative of those bloody and well-fought contests can refrain lamenting the loss of so much British blood shed in such a cause, or from weeping on whatever side victory might be declared?’

WILLIAM PITT, 12 JUNE 1781

WILLIAM PITT WALKED onto the floor of the House of Commons as a Member of Parliament for the first time on 23 January 1781. For around 230 years the Commons had met in St Stephen’s Chapel in the Palace of Westminster, with the Speaker’s chair placed on the altar steps, and the Members sitting on either side in the tiered choir stalls.^* In more recent times the Chapel had been altered to make it more suitable for parliamentary gatherings: a Strangers’ Gallery had been added on both sides, supported by columns reaching down among the Members, wooden panelling added throughout, and the lighting improved by enlarging the windows at the end nearest the River Thames and the hanging of large brass chandeliers from a lowered ceiling. There were nowhere near enough places for all the Members to sit, and the result, then as now, was that on major occasions the Chamber had a crowded and intimate atmosphere, easily roused to boisterousness and ribaldry.

The day on which Pitt took his seat was the first time the House had sat since breaking for Christmas in early December 1780. The floor of the House would have been busy, as it was around the end of January each year that Members were required to answer the ‘call of the House’, an actual rollcall of the Members who could in theory suffer a penalty for failure to attend. Looking around him Pitt would have seen an all-male legislature, younger in its average age than we would expect to see today, with around a hundred Members, more than one in six, being aged under thirty (compared to four Members out of 659 under thirty after the 2001 general election). He would have recognised among the Members a large slice of the youthful aristocracy – sixty-seven sons of peers, often the younger sons, were elected to the Commons in the election of 1780; his father had been right to call the Commons a ‘parcel of younger brothers’.¹ Scattered among them he would have seen several dozen senior officers of the army and navy, including General Burgoyne, who had surrendered at Saratoga in the American War of Independence, and the celebrated Admiral Keppel, who had lost his seat but immediately been given another one. He would have seen the legal profession in force, with around eighty trained lawyers on the benches on both sides of the House. It being winter, the country gentlemen would also be in town and taking their seats in large numbers, although most of them would take a great deal of persuading to stay any later than Easter. Some of them would have worked for their financial and political independence by climbing the ladder of government offices and Crown appointments, accepting the advice of Hans Stanley, Ambassador to St Petersburg: ‘Get into Parliament, make tiresome speeches, you will have great offers; do not accept them at first; then do; then make great provision for yourself and family, and then call yourself an independent country gentleman.’²

As commerce and industry expanded, so did the number of merchants and other businessmen sitting in the House. In this Parliament seventy-two Members were actively engaged in business, many more than twenty years before. A higher proportion than in the past were there as the culmination of their business efforts rather than in order to actually procure trade in Parliament, although about a quarter of them were engaged in government contracts and Treasury loans. Nevertheless, this was primarily an assembly of gentlemen and noblemen. They would not have embraced among their number many representatives of the emerging middle class, and even years later Pitt’s great friend George Canning would be sneered at in the Commons for his humble background. But the aristocratic origins of the Members certainly did not mean that the atmosphere in the small debating Chamber was reserved or formal. The German visitor Carl Moritz was ‘much shocked by the open abuse which Members of Parliament flung at each other’, and complained that ‘they enter the House in greatcoats, boots and spurs! It is not unusual to see a Member stretched out on one of the benches while the rest are in debate. One Member may be cracking nuts, another eating an orange or whatever fruit may be in season; they are constantly going in and out … Whenever one of them speaks badly or the matter of his speech lacks interest for the majority, the noise and laughter are such that the Member can hardly hear his own words.’³

The one exception to this disorderly appearance might have been the Treasury bench, the front bench on the Speaker’s right. For here sat the Members of His Majesty’s Government in court dress, symbolising their proximity to the King and their employment in his service. Pitt took his seat somewhere on the back benches opposite them, sitting naturally enough with the opponents of a government his father had denounced. Most of those seated around him would call themselves Whigs, but Pitt recognised that the party labels of the early eighteenth century now had little meaning. ‘I do not wish’, he had written two years earlier, ‘to call myself any Thing but an Independent Whig which in words is hardly a distinction, as every one alike pretends to it.’⁴

The success of the Whigs in the early eighteenth century had itself contributed to the term losing much of its meaning. The Jacobite cause was dead, and Tories who had the ability or the desire to seek office had called themselves Whigs, much as a Republican in the post-Civil War southern United States would need to call himself a Democrat. George III had said to Pitt’s father in 1765: ‘You can name no Whig familys that shall not have my Countenance; but where Torys come to me on Whig principles let us take them.’⁵ Domestic political divisions had further broken down with the disappearance of the most burning political issue of the mid-eighteenth century, the entanglement of British affairs with those of Hanover. Unlike his grandfather, George III was an utterly English King, who was much less preoccupied with his ancestral country, and only occasionally did he let it complicate his politics.

Most of the MPs had not in any case entered politics in order to pursue a political agenda, quite apart from the fact that it was still frowned upon to come into Parliament or even government with a preconceived notion of what should be done. As Sir Lewis Namier put it in his comprehensive study of eighteenth-century politicians The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III: ‘Men went there [the House of Commons] “to make a figure”, and no more dreamt of a seat in the House in order to benefit humanity than a child dreams of a birthday cake that others may eat it … The seat in the House was not their ultimate goal but a means to ulterior aims.’⁶

Soame Jenyns, the author and Cambridgeshire MP, writing in 1784, said: ‘Men … get into Parliament, in pursuit of power, honours, and preferments, and till they obtain them, determine to obstruct all business, and distress government. But happily for their Country, they are no sooner gratified, than they are equally zealous to promote the one, and support the other.’⁷ Apart from the few such as Pitt who really did go into Parliament in order to be politicians, Namier identified the following as making up the majority of MPs: the ‘inevitable Parliament men’ who were part of the completely political families such as the Townshends, Cornwallises and Cavendishes; the ‘country gentlemen’ who sought primacy in their own county; the ‘social climbers’ who sought peerages; the ‘placemen and purveyors of favours’ who sought commissionerships and various offices and sinecures; those seeking ‘professional advancement’ in the army, the navy, the Civil Service or the law; the ‘merchants and bankers’ who sought government contracts and arranged public loans, particularly in wartime; and occasionally a small number seeking immunity from prosecution or arrest.

We should not be surprised that this was the nature of Parliament in an age when there were no salaries or pensions for MPs, and little concept of meritocratic preferment in the services of the state. The network of patronage which spread out from the Crown and the Ministers on the Treasury bench extended far into positions in every county, regiment and even church. Indeed, the bishops and peers in the House of Lords were generally even more craven than MPs in their susceptibility to such ‘influence’, since they often hoped for a more lucrative diocese or a step up in the ranks of the peerage.

Any eighteenth-century government could therefore usually rely on a large majority in the House of Lords. The combination of large-scale patronage and a general predisposition among the ‘country gentlemen’ that the King should be able to get his way, provided he did not directly assault the role and power of the aristocracy, meant that governments usually held the upper hand in the Commons as well. At any one time, about a quarter of the Commons might hold some government office, sinecure or pension. More than a third would regard themselves as entirely independent of any factional party, although some would certainly be open to ‘influence’ at its most persuasive. On top of that, there would be about twenty MPs whose seats had been directly purchased for them by the Treasury. These various groups tended to coalesce around the leading members of one of the factions chosen by the King to head his ministry. And so it was that Pitt would have looked across the Chamber at the ‘King’s friends’ and the ‘country gentlemen’ massed behind the complacent-looking figure of Lord North, First Lord of the Treasury for more than a decade.^*

Lord North is generally remembered in British history without much respect or affection. Overweight and perhaps overpromoted, he is thought of as an uninspiring figure who carelessly lost the American colonies. He did indeed lack the administrative drive required from the centre of government at a time of war, but he was nevertheless an astute politician and a formidable parliamentarian. Despite his corpulence and tendency to doze off in debates, he could still command the House of Commons by means of powerful speeches and a noted sense of humour. During one long speech by George Grenville which reviewed the history of government revenues, North went into a sound sleep, having asked his neighbour to wake him when the speaker reached modern times. When he duly received a nudge, he listened for a moment and then exclaimed, ‘Zounds! You have waked me a hundred years too soon.’⁸

North is often thought of as a ‘Tory Prime Minister’, but he himself would have rejected both labels. True, there were Tories among the ‘country gentlemen’ who backed him, but these were the remnants of a now meaningless term. As for ‘Prime Minister’, he had explicitly denied being such a thing, lest he be held even more accountable for the failings of the government of which he was undoubtedly the senior member. Desperate to give up office for at least the last two years, but bound to the King by a mixture of duty and gratitude (George III had paid off his debts of £18,000), he had soldiered on with a war he no longer believed in. Despite experiencing some kind of nervous breakdown, he had maintained his outward good humour and amiability: ‘Constant threats of impeachment, fierce attacks upon himself and all his connexions, mingled execration of his measures and scorn of his capacity, bitter hatred of his person … seemed to have no effect on his habitually placid deportment, nor to consume his endless patience.’⁹

Lord North governed with the support of a small band of his own followers, along with the factions commanded by Lord Sandwich and Lord Gower, as well as the ever-helpful friends of the King. Alongside him on the front bench in the Commons Pitt would have seen Lord George Germain, Secretary of State for the Colonies, who had borne the brunt of directing the war and was even now hoping that the thrust into the southern colonies by Lord Cornwallis and his troops would finally defeat George Washington. Elsewhere on the Treasury bench would be Henry Dundas, the Lord Advocate for Scotland, who had begun developing an iron grip on the forty-five Scottish seats and was now a leading spokesman of the government in the Commons, albeit one who doubted that the government’s remaining life would be very long. Altogether, North could rely on around eighty MPs from his own and allied factions along with 140 ‘King’s friends’, so he needed the support of about fifty of the more than two hundred independents in order to win a majority in a full House.¹⁰

Facing North’s Ministers and sitting on the front bench of the opposition side of the House was Charles James Fox. Fox, thirty-two years old the next day and son of the politician Henry Fox, who had become Lord Holland, was considered the most eloquent debater in Parliament. Brilliant, generous, impulsive, emotional and hugely persuasive, he was an unceasing opponent of North and the war. The King hated and mistrusted him, and the feeling was mutual. Fox was inconsistent, unpredictable, a chronic gambler and a relentless womaniser, but his friends adored him and his hold over his followers was powerful. His colourful private life – he would shortly commence an affair with Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire – would undoubtedly damage his political prospects. One critical MP noted that it was not possible to ‘trace in any one action of his life anything that had not for its object his own gratification’.¹¹ He and his brother were said to have lost £32,000 in a single night of gambling, and when he was not betting at Brooks’s he was doing so at the races. Horace Walpole, son of the longest-serving Prime Minister Robert Walpole, and writer of extensive but biased political memoirs, recalled him as ‘the hero in Parliament, at the gaming table, at Newmarket. Last week he passed four-and-twenty hours without interruption at all three, or on the road from one to the other; and ill the whole time.’¹² In a life which from this point on would be increasingly intertwined with that of Pitt, Fox would stand out as his opposite in almost every personal respect: a rounded figure who enjoyed social gatherings, cultivated a party following, revelled in all the pleasures of the senses and in no way regarded political success as the sole object of his life. He would become Pitt’s arch-rival, and would eventually consider that he had only one thing in common with him: ‘The only thing like good about him is his inattention to money.’¹³ But for the moment he would attempt to draw Pitt into his circle, and he would do so as a dominant figure in the opposition, enjoying the devoted support of a wide circle of friends who considered that, in the words of Gibbon, ‘perhaps no human being was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity or falsehood’.¹⁴

Fox was the spokesman and inspiration of the Rockingham Whigs. Near him would have been Edmund Burke, secretary to Lord Rockingham, another figure of immense eloquence and persecutor of the King’s Ministers. Self-righteous and impassioned, he was driven on by his belief that the power and habits of George III were destroying the balance of the settlement of 1688. Around and behind Fox and Burke sat much the largest opposition grouping, comprising seventy to eighty Members.

Elsewhere on the opposition benches were the leaders of another but much smaller opposition faction, less than ten in number: John Dunning, who the previous year had successfully proposed the motion calling for a reduction in the powers of the Crown, and Colonel Barré, famed for accompanying General Wolfe in the storming of the cliffs at Quebec. The leaders of their grouping were the Earl of Shelburne and Lord Camden, who, like Rockingham, sat in the House of Lords. This grouping were the heirs of Chatham – Shelburne and Camden having served in his last government – and they were now joined in the new Parliament by Lord Mahon, John Pratt and, inevitably, William Pitt. As a new MP Pitt therefore looked to the Earl of Shelburne as his nominal leader. Shelburne was, after all, one of the few people who had encouraged Pitt in his bid for election at Cambridge the previous year. Intellectually brilliant, well informed about the full range of political and economic issues, and an enthusiastic exponent of the mix of economic liberalism and administrative improvements which Pitt would strongly support, Shelburne was nevertheless handicapped by what others saw as deficiencies of character. He could not resist displaying his brilliance and allowing others to see that he was manipulating them: ‘He flattered people in order to gain them, and he let it appear by his actions that his smooth words were sheer hypocrisy.’¹⁵ For the moment, however, he headed the small group of Chathamite loyalists.

These factions in Parliament manoeuvred for position and waited on events, but the politician who still mattered the most in the kingdom was George III himself. The King was a man of simple and straightforward views. The constitution must be upheld, which meant the rights of the Crown must be asserted. His coronation oath was inviolate. No politician should be trusted. No colonies could be surrendered in case others, including Ireland, rebelled. A good life required a regular diet, a huge amount of exercise, and marital fidelity. The Royal Family should set an example. His son, the Prince of Wales, was incapable of setting an example and had become a total disgrace. Disappointed by Bute, who had failed him, by George Grenville, who had lectured him, and by Chatham, who had let him down, George III had at last found in Lord North a politician with the pleasing combination of political staying power and a propensity to be bullied by his monarch. There was no question but that the policies carried out by North and his colleagues were the King’s policies, and that detailed decisions about political and military appointments and the approach to the war had been made by the King himself. When the opposition in Parliament attacked the policies of North, they were in fact attacking the actions of the King; the assaults of Burke on Crown appointments and the Civil List were another proxy for doing so.

The King was desperately worried that the war would end in defeat, and even spoke privately of abdicating rather than bearing the humiliation of himself and his kingdom. Not least among his concerns was that defeat in the war would mean the fall of North. The only other group of leaders in Parliament with widespread support were the Rockingham Whigs, to whom he could be forced to turn. That could mean being forced to accept Ministers he disliked intensely, and measures he would hate to see carried out in his name. Such Ministers would impose peace with America, abolish much of his patronage, and insist on having as junior Ministers some of his strongest opponents whom they would wish to reward. In contemplating these questions, George III was having to face up to some of the problems left unresolved by the ‘perfect’ constitutional arrangements resulting from 1688. The King had the right to choose a government, and the Commons the right to hold that government to account and even overturn it, requiring the King to nominate another. But what happened if a majority of the Commons decided to force a particular government upon the King? Rockingham and Fox intended to do so. George III would hate it. There was no answer written down in the settlement of 1688. The King still controlled many appointments and sinecures throughout the country, including Army appointments. What happened if the Commons insisted on taking all of those powers of appointment for itself? The King normally retained the right to choose particular Ministers and to continue some from one government to the next, even when the leading Minister changed. What happened if a new leading Minister came to him with a list of Ministers already decided and a majority of the House of Commons behind him?

George III was a wily political operator, and was determined not to show the weakness of his grandfather George II. The Duke of Newcastle had once forced George II into a corner in 1746 by presenting the collective resignation of all senior Ministers; when George III heard that he might try the same thing in 1762 he had fired him before he could open his mouth.

As 1781 opened, these political and constitutional questions hung in the balance. The war had gone a little better over the previous year, and the election had been satisfactorily concluded. The opposition seemed to have run out of steam and now, according to one of its members, was ‘if not dead at least asleep’.¹⁶ This was the political scene as William Pitt considered how to make his maiden speech.

A maiden speech in the House of Commons, then as now, was usually a rather humble affair. A Member would prepare for it for days, or even weeks, and would then rise nervously to advance a not too controversial proposition and accompany it with many thanks and pleasantries. Pitt’s maiden speech, delivered on 26 February 1781, was the exact opposite: delivered apparently on the spur of the moment and certainly without a note, radiating confidence despite taking place in a packed House debating a crucial motion, advancing a strong argument against the policies of the government and the Crown, and incidentally demolishing a key point of the previous speaker’s argument. The effect was to make him a major figure in the House of Commons from the very beginning of his career in it.