Forever Young: Myth, Reality and William Pitt

By R.E. Foster
Published in History Review Issue 63 March 2009
Georgian, Modern Britain William Pitt the Younger Political

R. E. Foster examines the career of Pitt the Younger.

In Britannia between Death and the Doctor's (1804), Gillray caricatured Pitt as a doctor kicking Addington
(the previous doctor) out of Britannia's sickroom.William Pitt is, in some respects, an unlikely political icon.
A delicate child, he was described as a man by H. A. Bruce as a ‘tall, ungainly, bony figure’. Pitt was a
satirist’s gift. The best known, James Gillray, also captured the aloofness that many remembered. In an
age where personal contacts mattered, Pitt was not clubbable. As William Wilberforce, a rare exception, put
it, ‘Pitt does not make friends.’ He preferred to immerse himself in the details of commerce and finance –
matters which Wilberforce dismissed as ‘subjects of a low and vulgarising quality’. But only Walpole has
served longer as prime minister. How is Pitt’s longevity and achievement to be explained?

Part of the answer lies in his parentage. Pitt’s mother was sister to George Grenville, Prime Minister in
1763-5. His father, Pitt the Elder, was Prime Minister in 1766-8. The precocity of his second son did not
escape the father’s notice: legend had it that young Pitt was schooled in oratory by being required to
address an imaginary audience at home! After Cambridge, he was offered a pocket borough in 1780. His
maiden speech in February 1781 made a memorable impression: ‘his manner easy and elegant; his
language beautiful and luxuriant’, as one eyewitness recorded it; as did his espousing Parliamentary
Reform and his criticism of ministers for their conduct of the war in America.

But Pitt’s meteoric rise cannot be explained unless we juxtapose his connections and talents alongside
political circumstances. In October 1781 British forces surrendered at Yorktown. In March 1782 the
beleaguered Lord North resigned as Prime Minister. His opponents coalesced briefly under Rockingham,
but their alliance did not survive his death in July. The Earl of Shelburne now assumed the premiership and
Pitt became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Shelburne’s government in turn resigned in February 1783,
victim of an alliance between North and his supposed antagonist, Charles James Fox. Their coalition from
March 1783, nominally led by the Duke of Portland, survived some six months. From the outset it faced a
deadly antagonist in George III. On 17 December 1783 the King’s influence was instrumental in the Lords
rejecting Fox’s India Bill. George used this as sufficient reason to dismiss the administration. Two days later
Pitt was installed as First Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister at the age of 24.

Pitt’s elevation owed much to the fact that by December 1783 he was one of the few men of obvious talent
who had not compromised his principles by allying with others. Nor was he old enough to have been
associated with the reverses of the American war. Crucially – for the monarch’s role in cabinet making still
mattered – he enjoyed the support of the King, if only because he had sided against Fox and North. But this
alone was insufficient to guarantee his long term survival. In the Commons, where he was the only member
of his cabinet with a seat, he was roughly 60 short of a majority. Though he inevitably lost Commons
divisions in the weeks which followed, he nevertheless survived. This owed much to his masterly
parliamentary performances in the face of adversity which won over many independent country gentlemen
on the back benches and also the political nation at large. That, at least, seems to be the conclusion one
should draw from the general election which followed George III’s dissolution of parliament in March 1784.
But Pitt’s resulting majority of about 120 also owed much to the government influence which the King, in
agreeing to an early election, put at Pitt’s disposal. Those opponents who had scoffed that Pitt’s would be a
‘mince pie’ administration – one that would not survive the Christmas season – were left to eat their words
instead.

The Politics of National Revival: 1783-1789

Pitt’s primary governmental objective was to revive the economy – exports fell 12 per cent in value during
the 1770s – and thus improve the national finances. This led him to undertake some administrative
rationalization, most significantly the creation of a consolidated fund in 1787 to supersede what had been
103 different revenue exchequer accounts. Other offices, judged to be superfluous, were eliminated by the
simple expedient of not filling them as they fell vacant: some 440 posts in the revenue services were shed
in this way between 1784 and 1793. But too many offices were sinecures in the hands of patrons for Pitt to
be able to effect wholesale change. Further, the great majority continued to be remunerated by fees rather
than by fixed salaries. That limitations remained was obvious. George Rose, Pitt’s Secretary to the
Treasury, unashamedly exploited this and several other positions which he held to undertake grandiose
additions to his Hampshire country estate. Even George III was moved to jest that ‘only a Secretary of
State’ could afford to maintain it.

Such retrenchments as were effected were accompanied by attempts to boost government revenues.
There were some new indirect taxes, such as those on horses, windows, and the number of servants.
Attempts to increase trade resulted principally in the 1786 Eden Treaty with France, and provided for
reciprocal duty cuts. To really improve customs revenues, however, necessitated an assault upon the
endemic problem of smuggling: it has been estimated that a fifth of all imports entered the country in this
way. Pitt’s response included amending the Hovering Act to allow searches of suspect vessels up to 12
miles out of port; whilst legitimate importers were treated with greater sensitivity by the extension of bonded
warehouses which required duties to be paid only when and if their goods were sold in Britain. But Pitt’s
major insight was that lower customs duties would both undercut the profitability of smuggling and generate
more trade and thus more revenue. The 1784 Commutation Act paved the way by cutting tea duties from
119 per cent to 25 per cent. By 1789 further cuts followed on wine, spirits and tobacco: by the mid 1790s
their respective customs yields had risen by 63, 29 and 39 per cent. By 1792 the total revenues from
customs had risen by nearly £2 million.

Pitt’s economic Holy Grail was to extinguish the National Debt. During the American War this had nearly
doubled to an unprecedented £243 million. Over a third of government expenditure, £8.5 million of £24
million, went on meeting the interest. By 1785, Pitt was ‘half mad with a project which will give our supplies
the effect almost of magic in the reduction of debt’. The cause of his excitement was the decision to
rejuvenate Walpole’s idea of a Sinking Fund, that is to say, to earmark monies accrued from annual
revenue surpluses to reduce the debt. By 1792 the debt had fallen to £170 million.

Pitt’s management of the national finances during the 1780s did not constitute a miracle. What happened
might better be described as a return to normality than a revival. Economic conditions were relatively
propitious, not least because Britain was beginning to enjoy the fruits of her labours as the first industrial
nation. But one must allow Pitt credit for being alive to new ideas such as those being propitiated by Adam
Smith, whose Wealth of Nations had appeared in 1776. Continued progress, however, required
international peace.

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The Politics of War: 1793-1802

Tory mythology holds Pitt to have been a great war leader: at his birthday dinner in May 1803 he was feted
as ‘the pilot who weathered the storm’. In fact, the early stages of the French Revolution did not excite him,
even though he had met both Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1783. So sanguine was he that French
affairs should not impinge upon Britain that in February 1792 he had predicted that ‘from the situation in
Europe, we might reasonably expect fifteen years of peace’.

Events quickly disabused him. When, in November 1792, the French government offered assistance to
revolutionaries everywhere, Pitt described it as ‘an act of hostility to neutral nations’. More concrete a threat
was presented the same month by the French victory over the Austrians at Jemappes, which left the latter’s
Belgian territories – and the Channel coast – at the mercy of the Revolution. On 1 February 1793 the
French Republic formally declared war on Britain and her Dutch ally.

The war which followed was a far messier affair than the monolithic image of Pitt as a resolute war leader
will allow. Britain had joined a multi-power coalition against the Republic by August 1793, but its parties
were more self-interested than united. By 1797 Britain was alone, and facing invasion. That this did not
happen owed much to the strategically-correct (if obvious) decision to expand the navy, which totalled
133,000 men by 1801. The Navy also enjoyed some success in its offensive operations, notably Howe’s
victory on 1 June 1794 which prevented the dispatch of French reinforcements to the West Indies; and
Nelson’s triumph at the Battle of the Nile in August 1798 which tied down French forces in Egypt. It also
facilitated the capture of overseas territories such as St. Lucia and Grenada in 1796.

This was certainly more than British land forces accomplished: the most lasting outcome of the Duke of
York’s expedition to Flanders in 1793-4 was a nursery rhyme! Little better were Pitt’s decisions to aid
counter-revolutionary forces in mainland France: at Toulon in 1793, and Brittany in 1795. These initiatives
proved to be as ill-timed as they were badly judged, not least in allowing the Revolution to assume the
mantle of patriotism against the foreign invader. Thereafter, Pitt fell back on a more traditional British land
war policy, that of bank-rolling his allies. Over £9 million had been disbursed by 1801. By then the Second
Coalition (1799-1801) had come and gone, but the French military machine remained unbroken.

Modern historians have tended, therefore, to echo Churchill’s judgement that Pitt was ‘an indifferent War
Minister’. This is unfair. France could no more be defeated on land than Britain could at sea. At least Pitt
resisted the dreamers who argued that Britain should plough its resources into mounting a direct military
assault on Paris. As he came to recognise, a compromise peace was the logical corollary, though he was
out of office by the time the Peace of Amiens was concluded in May 1802. Pitt praised the outcome as
being ‘honourable’ and ‘very advantageous’, but it is doubtful if he would have agreed to hand back most of
Britain’s newly-acquired overseas possessions without any obvious quid pro quo in terms of European
security.

If one has to criticize his conduct, then it must be for his apparent complacency before war started. His
1792 budget included defence cuts such that at the outbreak of war the British army stood at 13,000 men
and the navy only 15,000. Thereafter, he improvised as best he could. He was as successful as
circumstances allowed, that is to say not spectacularly so. By May 1803 war had broken out again.

The Politics of Repression: 1793-1801

War against Revolutionary France had profound consequences on the domestic scene. One casualty was
the National Debt. By 1801 this had mushroomed to £456 million. Believing the war would be short, Pitt’s
short-term answer had been to raise loans, but from 1799 he resorted to the innovative and unpopular
income tax, a direct, graduated levy on all incomes above £60.

It was Radicals, however, who came to see themselves as the real victims of an oppressive Pitt.
Radicalism hailed the French Revolution, and specifically the idea of manhood suffrage, as the medium to
a more just society. Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, the most famous exposition of the view, sold a staggering
200,000 copies within a year of its publication in 1792. A revivified Society for Constitutional Information
took up the call. So, for the first time, did ordinary working men in scores of clubs, of which the London
Corresponding Society became the biggest and best known.

But Pitt saw little that was reasonable in a French regime which, by February 1793, he judged guilty of both
regicide and war. He denounced ‘principles … which, if not opposed, threaten the most fatal consequences
to the tranquillity of this country … the good order of every European government, and the happiness of the
whole of the human race.’ A state backlash consequently ensued. In Scotland the republican Thomas Muir
was subjected to a virtual show trial; he received 14 years’ transportation. April 1794 saw Parliament
suspend Habeas Corpus. In the following month 12 Radicals, including the veteran John Horne Tooke,
were tried for treason. They were acquitted, but Pitt achieved his aim of deterring much Radical activity,
whilst driving its more extreme elements underground. Nor was he done. Using an attack on the King’s
coach in October 1795 as part pretext, the Seditious Meetings Act required magistrates to sanction any
meeting of more than 50 persons, whilst the Treasonable Practices Act extended the definition of treason to
include speaking or writing anything unconstitutional. There followed an Act against Administering Unlawful
Oaths (1797), two Newspaper Publications Acts (1798-9), and the Combination Laws (1799-1800), which
effectively outlawed trade unions.

Was Pitt really bent upon his own version of the Terror? Most of his ‘repressive’ measures were
preventative in character. Thus the Home Office was expanded in 1793 and spies used to infiltrate suspect
groups. Subsidies amounting to about £5,000 per annum were provided to patriotic newspapers, the Sun
and True Briton being launched with ministerial blessing. Tacit endorsement was also afforded to bodies
like John Reeves’ Association for the Protection of Property against Republicans and Levellers. Pitt also
tried to canalise the outpourings of patriotism which followed the outbreak of war. Alongside the county
based militia, volunteer corps were permitted after 1794; by the turn of the century the latter boasted over
400,000 men. Pitt also recognised that Radicalism flourished in times of economic discontent. Though he
baulked at legislating on wages and prices, his government did follow a policy of buying up overseas wheat
for a while in 1795. The same year he legislated to allow magistrates to distribute poor relief without the
recipients having to enter workhouses.

Can Pitt really, therefore, be said to have over-reacted? There were some 200 treason trials in the 1790s,
more than the norm. There were also executions, such as the six which followed the Despard plot in 1802-
3. It would certainly be true to say that Radicals in the 1790s ran more risk of suffering physical violence
from the state and its patriotic supporters than they exhibited a willingness to inflict. By comparison,
however, one should remember that tens of thousands of ordinary French people perished in the Great
Terror of 1793-4. Pitt was surely right to take the potential threat seriously, even if he over-estimated its
strength. There was a hard core of extreme Radicals, principally in Ireland; there was contact between
them and an enemy state which was planning invasion; there were mutinies in the navy in 1797; and
economic conditions for the general population were hard, particularly in 1795, 1797-8, and 1801-2. Had
these factors coincided, the mix would undeniably have been explosive.

The Politics of Decline: c.1794-1806

Whilst it was hardly intended, one consequence of external and domestic events in the early 1790s was to
strengthen Pitt’s political position. In 1788-9 this was briefly precarious, owing to George III’s temporary
insanity. The general presumption was that a regency would herald a Fox administration. But the king
recovered, Pitt sustained his majority at the 1790 election, and Fox’s popularity waned as the French
Revolution waxed violent. The latter issue so divided his supporters that a number of them, headed by
Portland, crossed the floor to join Pitt in July 1794.

From the mid 1790s, however, Pitt’s political road was a tortuous one. This was largely the result of the
ongoing but inconclusive struggle with France and, as he put it in 1800, ‘that of the scarcity with which it is
necessarily combined, and for the evils and growing dangers of which I see no adequate remedy’. His
physical and mental health too was cause for concern, weakened by strain, gout and alcohol. But it was
‘the unlucky Subject of Ireland’ that eventually afforded relief. Sectarian and nationalist discontent had
mounted there ever since it had been granted a separate parliament in 1782. In 1798 outright rebellion had
been brutally suppressed. Pitt became convinced that Britain’s security was best safeguarded by ending
the constitutional experiment. The Act of Union, which came into effect on 1 January 1801, abolished the
Dublin parliament and provided for the election of 100 MPs to Westminster. But his further conclusion, that
the pacification of Ireland required allowing Catholics the right to sit there, was vetoed by George III. On 3
February 1801 Pitt submitted his resignation.

From 1801 until war resumed in May 1803 Pitt was politically withdrawn. He re-entered the limelight when
he became persuaded that his successor, Addington, was insufficiently preparing the nation’s defences.
Pitt replaced him in May 1804, but not with the broad based administration which he had hoped for. A Third
Coalition was nevertheless constructed in 1805, and victory at Trafalgar in October suggested to Pitt’s
friends that his return to office had provided the necessary talisman. At the Lord Mayor’s Guildhall banquet
in November, in his most memorable public utterance Pitt denied it: ‘I return you my thanks for the honour
you have done me; but Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England saved herself by her
exertions and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.’ It was the falsest of dawns. Napoleon’s crushing
victory over the Russians and Austrians at Austerlitz in December eviscerated the Third Coalition. Within
two months Pitt was dead, his former ailments probably combining with a peptic ulceration of the stomach.

Legacies and Reputation

It is easy to criticise Pitt. Some issues he espoused, such as the abolition of the slave trade, did not
succeed in his lifetime. His refusal to resign after such reverses suggests, as his enemies charged, a love
of office. When Pitt died Britain’s prospects were arguably bleaker than at any time since 1783. The nation
faced daunting economic and financial problems, discontent in Ireland, a rampant French Empire abroad,
and a king of doubtful sanity at home. Pitt’s final words, ‘Oh, my country! How I leave my country!’ were
hardly born of delirium.

Yet there were outpourings of grief. This was partly in recognition of his elevated character. Wilberforce
said that, ‘for willingness to give a fair hearing to all that could be urged against his own opinions, and to
listen to the suggestions of men he knew to be inferior to his own; for personal purity, disinterestedness,
integrity, and love of his country, I have never known his equal.’ Pitt’s posthumous appeal, however, was
based on more. In death he became a set of ideals. In the generation after his death, his defence of church
and state against revolution was claimed as his true legacy, and appropriated by the Tory party. Its leaders,
Portland, Perceval and Liverpool, all claimed to be his heirs. Another, Wellington, in an unusually overt
political act for him, consented to join the Hampshire Pitt Club, one of many that flourished.

Pitt’s legacy, however, was disputed. What old Tories chose to remember was a caricature of the 1790s
Pitt. Palmerston vented his frustration in 1822 at ‘the stupid old Tory party, who bawl out the memory and
praises of Pitt while they are opposing all the measures and principles which he held most important.’ For
him and Canning there was an earlier, reforming Pitt. The Pitt who spoke in May 1783 for Parliamentary
Reform that would ‘renew and invigorate the spirit of the Constitution without deviating materially from its
present form’, would not have been out of place on the Whig front bench in 1831. Similarly, the elder Sir
Robert Peel, impressed by Pitt’s financial and commercial policies, claimed that he had dedicated his son
and namesake to pick up the great man’s torch as early as his christening in 1788! Some have therefore
claimed to see Pittite traditions in both Peelite Conservatism and, through that, to Gladstonian Liberalism:
the young Gladstone even compiled a detailed timeline of Pitt’s life in 1838.

Such claims are dubious. Pitt, though he once described himself as an independent Whig, eschewed party
labels. His political world was not one in which collective cabinet responsibility or strong party discipline
were salient features. Parliamentary majorities required genuinely winning the support of independent
backbenchers, though the latter was more likely if the measure being promoted enjoyed the support of the
crown. It was generally conceded that his composite talents – his oratory, intellect, capacity for hard work,
and mastery of detail – allowed him to succeed more often, and for longer, as prime minister, than anybody
else could have. The regard in which he has been held by those who filled the office after him, including
Churchill and Wilson in the twentieth century, consequently might allow us to claim for Pitt the title of the
Prime Ministers’ prime minister.