Beyond Westminster, many people who did not appreciate the need for such changes were suspicious of the motives behind them. Such suspicion was political dynamite, and it was accidentally detonated in the summer of 1780 by Lord George Gordon, leader of the Protestant Association. His attempt to take a petition to Parliament calling for the repeal of the 1778 Act resulted in a crowd of 60,000 forming across the river from the Palace of Westminster, siege being laid to Members of Parliament, and then five days and nights of perhaps the worst rioting London had ever experienced. Order was only restored after resolute action by the King, and the calling in of 15,000 troops and militia. Many hundreds of people were killed and scores of London’s most prized residences destroyed in untold scenes of savagery and destruction. Pitt, in his rooms at Lincoln’s Inn, was in the centre of it, apparently free from danger but witnessing London in flames in all directions. With the relaxed humour that was becoming his trademark he wrote to his mother: ‘Several very respectable lawyers have appeared with musquets on their shoulders, to the no small diversion of all spectators. Unluckily the Appearance of Danger ended just as we embodied, and our military Ardour has been thrown away.’29 He could not have failed to notice, however, the huge power of religious issues, and the dangers of letting popular feelings run out of control. As he contemplated the end of what he called the ‘placid uniformity’ of Cambridge life, and the start of a political career, he was learning that great issues were at stake – of war and peace, of monarchical or parliamentary power, of the rights of religious minorities, and of how to administer and control a society changing unpredictably at home and suffering military humiliation abroad. It was a dramatic and exciting time to enter politics. If he was to have any influence on it, he needed a career, he needed money, and he needed a seat in Parliament.
* * *
* The main room of the set is now a function room, with portraits of Pitt and Gray on the walls.
* In his wonderful book recounting his travels in England, Moritz also remarks on the ‘incomparable’ English habit of ‘roasting slices of buttered bread before the fire … this is called “toast”’.
3
Ambition on Schedule
‘Appelby is the Place I am to Represent.’
WILLIAM PITT
‘A dead minister, the most respectable that ever existed, weighs very light in the scale against any living one.’
EARL TEMPLE
‘CHATHAM’, STANHOPE REMARKED in his 1860s biography of Pitt, ‘had been a little unthrifty.’1 This was putting it mildly. On the death of Chatham in 1778, Parliament voted £20,000 – the equivalent of something approaching £2 million today* – to rescue his family and his memory from financial embarrassment. They also voted an annuity of £4,000 in perpetuity to the Earldom of Chatham, now inherited by William’s elder brother John. Theoretically, William Pitt was left £3,500 by his father. In practice, there was no money to honour this legacy, since the whole of the generous grant by Parliament would be taken up by his father’s debts. William had also been left a share of the mortgaged properties at Burton Pynsent and Hayes, but none of this came his way until Hayes was sold, by which time he was already Prime Minister. His total income as he prepared to move from Cambridge into the wider world was £600 a year, in the form of a grant from his elder brother. This was to prove insufficient for the needs of a young gentleman laying the foundations of his career and travelling about in the south-east of England a good deal. When he needed more he submitted a request to his mother. ‘My finances’, he tells her in November 1778, ‘are in no urgent Want of Repair; but if I should happen to buy a Horse they will be soon, and therefore, if it is not inconvenient to you, I shall be much obliged to you for a draught of 50£.’2 Or in December 1779: ‘The approach of Christmas, and the expense of moving, oblige me to beg you to supply me with a draft of 60£.’3
He was particularly assiduous in assuring his mother that he would not drink too much or work too hard, as in this letter from Cambridge in January 1780:
The Charge of looking slender and thin when the doctor saw me, I do not entirely deny; but if it was in a greater degree than usual, it may fairly be attributed to the hurry of London, and an accidental cold at the Time … The use of the horse I assure you I do not neglect, in the properest medium; and a sufficient number of idle avocations secure me quite enough from the danger of too much study … Among the Principal Occupations of Cambridge at this Season of Christmas are perpetual College Feasts, a species of Exercise in which, above all others, I shall not forget your rule of moderation.4
His mother helped him financially whenever she could, but since the annuity settled upon Chatham by the King in 1761 and now due to her was frequently in arrears she was not always able to do so. Soon Pitt had borrowed £1,000 at 5 per cent from the friendly banker Mr Thomas Coutts, in return for his signing over the paternal legacy which would never be paid. In order to pursue a career at the Bar, however, he needed a residence at Lincoln’s Inn, which required still more substantial resources. He wrote hopefully to his mother:
It will very soon be necessary for me to have rooms at Lincoln’s Inn … The whole expense of these will be Eleven Hundred Pounds, which sounds to me a frightful sum … The rooms are in an exceeding good situation in the new Buildings, and will be perfectly fit for Habitation in about two months. Soon after that time it will be right for me to begin attending Westminster Hall during the term, and then chambers will be more convenient than any other residence … I have done no more than to secure that they may not be engaged to any other person till I have returned an Answer, and I shall be glad to know your opinion as soon as possible. You will be so good as to consider how far you approve of the idea, if it be practicable, and whether there are any means of advancing the money out of my fortune before I am of Age.5
Desperate to help him, his mother was no doubt behind the surprise suggestion by his uncle Earl Temple that he would advance Pitt the necessary sum. Having paid the first instalment, Earl Temple disobligingly died, and Pitt secured the chambers on the promise of his late uncle’s obligation, while mortgaging them the following year to obtain more cash. Already, at the age of twenty-one, he had dipped a toe into the vicious whirlpool that his personal finances would become.
From his late teens Pitt enjoyed the busy life of a young man who could move about freely, flitting between the family homes, attendance at Lincoln’s Inn and the Galleries of the Lords and Commons in London, and the reassuring intellectual security of Pembroke College. He was often in London with his brothers and sisters, frequently staying in Harley Street at the house of his older sister Hester, who in 1775 had married Lord Mahon, son of Earl Stanhope, and by early 1780 had three children. Pitt seems to have attended the opera occasionally, having developed a taste for music at Cambridge even though Pretyman subsequently insisted that he had ‘no ear’,6 and reported attending masquerades and evenings at the Pantheon,* but he was not keen on the wilder social events:
Nerot’s Hotel, Wednesday Night [1779]
James is gone with my sisters to the ball as a professed dancer, which stands in the place of an invitation; a character which I do not assume, and have therefore stayed away.
He continued to prefer more intellectual evenings. It was at a dinner in Lincoln’s Inn during the Gordon Riots that the celebrated encounter took place between the twenty-one-year-old Pitt and the already famous historian Edward Gibbon, who was publishing the second and third volumes of his momentous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Another young lawyer, James Bland Burges, described how Gibbon had just concluded a series of ‘brilliant and pleasant’ anecdotes ‘with his customary tap on the lid of his snuff box’, when ‘a deep toned but clear voice was heard from the bottom of the table, very calmly and firmly impugning the correctness of the narrative, and the propriety of the doctrine of which it had been made the vehicle’. Gibbon saw
a tall, thin, and rather ungainly looking young man, who now sat quietly and silently eating some fr
uit. There was nothing very prepossessing or very formidable in his exterior, but, as the few words he had uttered appeared to have made a considerable impression on the company, Mr. Gibbon, I suppose, thought himself bound to maintain his honour by suppressing such an attempt to dispute his supremacy. He accordingly undertook the defence of the propositions in question, and a very animated debate took place between him and his youthful antagonist, Mr. Pitt, and for some time was conducted with great talent and brilliancy on both sides. At length the genius of the young man prevailed over that of his senior, who, finding himself driven into a corner from which there was no escape, made some excuse arising from the table and walked out of the room.
Gibbon stalked out ‘in high dudgeon’, and ‘when we returned into the dining-room we found Mr. Pitt proceeding very tranquilly with the illustration of the subject from which his opponent had fled, and which he discussed with such ability, strength of argument, and eloquence, that his hearers were filled with profound admiration’.7
It had been clear for some years that a career as a lawyer would be a fallback for Pitt, and the proximity to the House of Commons of the law courts, literally yards away in and around Westminster Hall, provided an additional incentive for him. As it turned out, his legal career was not long, but during it he again showed his usual mixture of easy ability and high popularity in private company. Another lawyer of the time recalled: ‘Among lively men of his own time of life, Mr. Pitt was always the most lively and convivial in the many hours of leisure which occur to young unoccupied men on a Circuit, and joined all the little excursions to Southampton, Weymouth, and such parties of amusement as were habitually formed. He was extremely popular. His name and reputation of high acquirements at the university commanded the attention of his seniors. His wit, his good humour, and joyous manners endeared him to the younger part of the Bar.’8
He was called to the Bar in the summer of 1780, but it is clear throughout all his correspondence that his overriding fascination remained with politics. In the summer of 1779 it was thought by some that Parliament might be dissolved two years ahead of its maximum seven-year term. The war was going badly, Lord North and his colleagues appeared dejected and the King was even forced to preside at a Cabinet meeting to try to deter North’s enemies from attacking his First Minister. Pitt turned his thoughts to how and where he could enter Parliament.
Pitt wanted to be in Parliament from the earliest possible date, but it did not accord with his concept of himself simply to represent any constituency which was available. He had a very clear idea of where he wished to represent, and from the summer of 1779 expressed an explicit interest in being one of the two Members for Cambridge University.* This was not simply because he spent a good deal of time there and was familiar with the place, since there was little need in this period for most Members of Parliament to know or to spend time in their constituencies. Rather it was because from the outset he wanted to be a particular type of politician, and that would require a particular type of constituency.
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, accustomed as we are to universal suffrage and the periodic redrawing of constituency boundaries to keep up with the changing distribution of population, the electoral basis of the House of Commons in the eighteenth century seems extraordinary and chaotic. It was not democratic in any modern sense of the term, and was not intended to be; but it was intended to ensure that the interests of every part of the country were represented, and that an element of competition took place among the aristocracy and country gentry as to who would have access to power and the spoils of office.
The House of Commons in 1780 had 558 Members, around a hundred fewer than today, with 489 from England, forty-five from Scotland and twenty-four from Wales. Ireland had a separate Parliament which was to be given increased powers in 1782, so there were no Irish seats in the House of Commons at this stage. Only the English constituencies were of interest to Pitt as he sought his first election to Parliament. Of these the generally most prestigious were the forty counties, each of which elected two Members. For two reasons, however, these were of little appeal to a politician who aspired to high office. First, they had a relatively wide franchise, embracing all males who owned the freehold of land with a rental value of more than forty shillings a year, and could have electorates running into many thousands. A contested election in Yorkshire, for instance, could easily produce 20,000 voters at the poll. As a result they were extremely expensive to contest (William Wilberforce’s two opponents in Yorkshire in 1807 reportedly spent over £100,000 each – the equivalent of more than £5 million), and the funds had to be found by the candidate, or a rich patron, or his supporters. Often huge sums were spent on a ‘canvass’ of county seats to see whether it was worth putting a particular candidate forward before embarking on the immense expense and trouble of actually contesting the election. In the 1780 election, only two counties would actually go to the lengths of having a contest.
As an additional obstacle it had been agreed in 1707, as part of an earlier attempt to rein in the patronage of the Crown, that an MP accepting an office of profit from the Crown such as a ministerial position would resign his seat and fight a by-election. This practice continued into the early twentieth century, sometimes leading to the defeat of freshly appointed Ministers such as Winston Churchill in 1908. In the eighteenth century the expense of fighting a county seat over and over again would have prohibited a ministerial career. On the whole, the counties were represented by ‘independent country gentlemen’ from long-established local families, but occasionally a contested county could give great authority to a popular campaign, such as the repeated re-election of John Wilkes for Middlesex in the 1760s.
By far the most numerous constituencies were the 203 cities and boroughs which elected 405 Members between them. These were heavily weighted to the south-west of the country and to seaports, and were still based on the wealth and prominence of towns in mediaeval times. The entitlement to vote in these constituencies varied hugely, sometimes being relatively wide as in the counties (the City of Westminster itself being an example), sometimes limited to the few dozen members of the corporation of the town, and sometimes limited to the owners of certain properties or ‘burgages’. It was thus variously possible to control a borough by instructing the voters, by bribing the corporation, or simply by owning sufficient burgages. Landowners would commonly instruct their tenants how to vote, and since the voting itself was openly recorded this rarely left the voters with much of a choice. In other circumstances voters could sell themselves to the highest bidder. As Thomas Pitt wrote in 1740: ‘There are few [Cornish] boroughs where the common sort of people do not think they have as much right to sell themselves and their votes, as they have to sell their corn and their cattle.’9 The provision of meals and alcohol was a standard part of such bribery; alcohol could be useful in other ways too, as George Selwyn, MP for Gloucester, complained in 1761. ‘Two of my voters were murdered yesterday by an experiment which we call shopping, that is, locking them up and keeping them dead drunk to the day of election. Mr. Snell’s agents forced two single Selwyns into a post chaise, where, being suffocated with the brandy that was given them and a very fat man that had the custody of them, they were taken out stone dead.’10
Over half of the boroughs could be purchased in one way or another, an average price in the late eighteenth century being around £3,000 to £4,000. They would be bought by the major political families, who might control half a dozen such seats; or by ‘Nabobs’ returning with money from India and seeking to use their wealth to purchase influence; or, amazingly by the standards of later centuries, by the Treasury itself, which would often use several tens of thousands of pounds of the King’s money, and some of the taxpayer’s, to procure the election of government candidates in a general election.
Pitt set his face against contesting most of these constituencies. He could not afford the expense of fighting one of the truly open boroughs, nor was he well enough know
n in any of them to have a chance of success. He did not want to be instructed how to vote in Parliament by a patron who had purchased his election, and he was not a supporter of the government. He received tentative offers from his cousins of the old family borough of Old Sarum, which Thomas Pitt had pawned to the Treasury in 1761 as he fled bankruptcy, and of Buckingham, which was in the pocket of Earl Temple. Not only were these offers vague, but he told his mother he was worried that taking them up could not ‘be done on a liberal, Independent Footing’.11 For Pitt was even now pursuing the ideal of being different from other politicians. He already combined a radiant intellectual self-confidence with his deep sense of being Chatham’s son, and Chatham had cultivated at the high points of his career the notion of detachment and independence from party and patronage (although he had been happy to represent the pocket boroughs of the Duke of Newcastle for many years). Pitt, who was carried along by the demands for economical and parliamentary reform as the answer to the corruption and waste so evident under Lord North, aspired to succeed in politics through ‘character’ rather than through ‘influence’. Steeped in the classical texts which praised the ‘virtue’ of outstanding figures, he could be forgiven for envisaging his own heroic role as an answer to the corruption of the times and a reinforcement of the traditions of his father. He already knew enough not to be naïve about political methods, and would be happy to let ‘influence’ be used on his behalf, but throughout his entire career he would seek to maintain the independence and incorruptibility of his own character, and at all costs the appearance of it.
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 6