His immense intellectual self-confidence was combined with a second factor: the expectation that his hour would come. In part this was the natural feeling of a young man who had advanced far in politics at an early age. Old politicians have the advantage of seeing events in the perspective of the past, but young ones have the satisfaction of accepting events in the perspective of the future. The elder Pitt had lived for seventy years. As an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of twenty-three the younger Pitt could look forward to decades of pre-eminence in politics among colleagues still unborn. More immediately, he would undoubtedly have known from his cousin Temple and his own dealings with the King of the iron determination of George III to change the government when he could. Perhaps this explains one of Wraxall’s other observations, that Pitt ‘even while seated on the Opposition bench, appeared to anticipate his speedy return to power as certain, and only to wait for the occasion presenting itself to resume his former functions’.36
Such calculations would have reinforced Pitt’s confidence even in defeat, but there is a third factor which is also of great significance. His achievements to date helped to put him at the centre of a small circle of talented or loyal friends whose friendship sustained him when in office, but all the more so when out of it. Wilberforce recalled that after Pitt’s defiant speech of 21 February, ‘I remember our all going to Mr. Pitt’s from the House of Commons after our defeat about eight in the morning, where a dinner had been waiting for us from eleven or twelve the preceding night, and where we all laughed heartily.’37 On the day of his resignation as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Pitt joined Wilberforce for supper at Goostree’s and they stayed up much of the night. Pitt and his friends then descended on the house Wilberforce had inherited in Wimbledon, then a village in rural Surrey and a seven-mile ride from Westminster. Wilberforce’s diary recorded: ‘Delicious day, – lounged morning at Wimbledon with friends, foining* at night, and run about the garden for an hour or two.’38 Wilberforce’s house had eight or nine bedrooms* and a large garden. He explained that ‘Mr. Pitt, who was remarkably fond of sleeping in the country, and would often go out of town for that purpose as late as eleven or twelve o’clock at night, slept at Wimbolton for two or three months together.’39
Notwithstanding the fact that he had recently held one of the highest offices in the land, Pitt briefly found that spring and summer the exuberance of youth. Thomas Orde, MP for Aylesbury and one of Pitt’s circle, soon to become Chief Secretary of Ireland, was expected by Lord Shelburne to report to him on what Pitt was up to, and wrote: ‘He passes, as usual, most of his time with his young Friends in a Society sometimes very lively – Some little excess happen’d lately at Wimbledon … In the Evening some of the Neighbours were alarmed with noises at their doors, but Nobody, I believe, has made any reflection upon a mere frolic – it has only been pleasantly remarked, that the Rioters were headed by Master P. – late Chancellor of the Ex—, and Master Arden, late Sollicitor Genl.’40 Wilberforce’s diary that summer reads: ‘Sunday July 6th, Wimbledon. Persuaded Pitt and Pepper [Arden] to church. July 11th. Fine hot day. Went on water with Pitt and Eliot fishing. Came back, dined, walked evening. Eliot went home. Pitt stayed.’
Pitt’s behaviour among friends was the polar opposite of the icy coldness which Wraxall had observed. The explanation given by Wilberforce for this contrast is that Pitt was the ‘shyest man’ he ever knew: ‘great natural shyness … and even awkwardness … often produced effects for which pride was falsely charged on him’.41 Pitt is himself meant to have said to Wilberforce, ‘I am the shyest man alive.’42 Yet with these friends he threw off his restraints, writing to Wilberforce one afternoon from the Commons: ‘Eliot, Arden and I will be with you before curfew and expect an early meal of peas and strawberries.’43 One of the friends, Dudley Ryder, the future Earl of Harrowby, found one morning that the expensive hat he had worn to the opera the previous night had been cut up by Pitt and scattered over the flowerbeds.
The same spirit infected their proceedings everywhere. Harriot Pitt wrote one evening that she could hardly write for the noise of their laughter, and the MP George Selwyn noted one night in 1782: ‘When I left the House, I left in one room a party of young men, who made me, from their life and spirit, wish for one night to be twenty. There was a table full of them drinking – young Pitt, Lord Euston, Berkley, North &c. &c. singing and laughing à gorge déployée.’44
Pitt’s friends revered him. Wilberforce said of his humour: ‘Mr. Pitt was systematically witty … the others were often run away with by their wit. Mr. Pitt was always master of his. He could turn it to any end or object he desired.’45 Later in his career they would come to regard him as ‘something between God and Man’.46 This was in spite of his unprepossessing appearance. Pitt’s niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, would write many years later that ‘Mr. Pitt’s was not a face that gave one the idea of a clever man. As he walked through the park, you would have taken him for a poet, or some such person, thin, tall, and rather awkward; looking upwards as if his ideas were en air and not remarking what was passing around him.’47 All agreed that only his eyes gave force to his appearance: they ‘lent animation to his other features … they lighted up and became strongly intelligent’,48 and ‘lighted up in a manner quite surprising. It was something that seemed to dart from within his head, and you might see sparks coming from them,’49 even though he often ‘had a sort of slovenly or negligent look’. Outside the House of Commons he seemed to lack presence, being ungainly and with little in the way of elegance or polished manners. Yet in the House of Commons, this strange-looking young man was the principal opposition to what His Majesty reluctantly called his government.
Pitt now had a political following as well as a circle of friends. Dundas had become a permanent lieutenant, and the Marquis of Carmarthen wrote that ‘I am proud to own my conduct should be regulated by yours.’ Thomas Pitt observed of the King that ‘it was to him alone that we must look up … when the moment should be ripe for it’.50 Pitt’s chosen style of opposition was judicious, displaying ‘neither an illiberal, a vindictive, nor an undistinguishing resistance to Ministerial measures’.51 Riding to and fro from Wimbledon, he was regularly on his feet in the Commons. In April he exchanged sharp words with Ministers over the disadvantageous terms on which they had raised a loan – the Ministers argued that Pitt’s delay in leaving office had left them in a difficult situation. Later in the session he brought forward the Bills on which he had worked as Chancellor, principally directed at removing waste from government departments. One of these was defeated in the Commons, and the other in the Lords. Pitt was not impressed by successors who did not have the political will or the concern for public money to carry his measures through.
It was once again to parliamentary reform that he directed his greatest efforts in the spring of 1783, and on which he suffered his most severe disappointment. On 7 May, the anniversary of his narrowly defeated motion to set up a Select Committee on parliamentary reform, he brought to the Commons a more specific plan to prevent bribery at elections, to disenfranchise boroughs guilty of corruption, and to add a hundred new Members for London and the counties. He had agreed with Wyvill a moderate approach to reform, rejecting in his speech any idea of universal suffrage and stressing that he only wished to correct ‘a deviation from the principles of that happy constitution under which the people of England had so long flourished’. He had real hopes for success, and the added bonus of advancing a course on which Fox and North were clearly divided. But Wyvill had hoped that Pitt would be proposing reform as a senior Minister; now this was not to be, and powerful forces were stacked against them. MPs turned out to be more hostile to a specific plan of reform than they were reassured by it; public apathy seemed more apparent than enthusiasm as the petitions and addresses failed to flow in the numbers needed; and while Fox gave nominal support to Pitt’s motion, North opposed it in a brilliant speech which maximised the vote against it. The vote went 293 to 149 against reform. Pit
t wrote to his mother: ‘My defeat was much more complete than I expected.’
Fox had been civil to Pitt in the early weeks of the new government, no doubt with a possible view to recruiting him to it and disabling the opposition. There can be little doubt, however, that as Pitt watched Fox participate in a government which failed to argue for parliamentary reform, failed to deliver further economical reform, and failed to improve upon the peace terms which it had formerly denounced, he felt his breach with Fox was complete. And very soon the King would again put temptation in his way.
On 12 August 1783 George, Prince of Wales would come of age, requiring the creation of his own establishment and household. The attempt to settle his financial affairs would come within an ace of destroying the Fox – North administration within three months of it taking office. True to Hanoverian tradition, the Prince of Wales was developing a personality the precise opposite of that of his father, the King. In his late teens he had become a notorious philanderer, beginning at the age of sixteen by seducing one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour and going on to have a string of mistresses, at least two of whom he passed on to Charles James Fox. At Brooks’s Club and elsewhere he socialised with the very politicians whom his father detested. As the King put it: ‘The Prince of Wales on the smallest reflection must feel that I have little reason to approve of any part of his conduct for the last three years; his neglect of every religious duty is notorious; his want of common civility to the Queen and me, not less so; besides his total disobedience of every injunction.’52
Fox succeeded in persuading the other Ministers that his friend the Prince should be granted an income of £100,000 per annum, a proposition the Duke of Portland then had to put to the King, along with the information that the Prince had already run up debts of £29,000. George III responded: ‘It is impossible for me to find words expressive enough of my utter indignation and astonishment at the letter I have just received from the Duke of Portland.’ Continuing the explosions for several days, the King proposed £50,000 per annum instead. The government was paralysed, and when the Commons assembled to hear Fox make a statement on the matter he was not able to say anything at all. Not knowing what to do, Portland was surprised to find a little later, on 18 June, that the King had apparently mellowed in his attitude, and the Prince was induced to accept a compromise: £50,000 a year and the paying off of debts of £60,000, along with a dutiful exchange of letters between father and son.
The King had not actually mellowed; he had merely calculated the political odds. In the interim he had consulted Temple, telling him that he had ‘decided to resist this attempt [the £100,000 proposal], and to push the consequences to their full extent, and to try the spirit of the Parliament and of the people upon it’;53 but Temple advised him that it would be difficult to form a new administration if Ministers were dismissed on such a pretext. The King decided to bide his time but to take further soundings, possibly in order to be readier for the next such occasion. Thurlow was sent to sound out Pitt on the strength of his commitment to parliamentary reform, which the King opposed, and his readiness to make a bid for power with the support of the Crown. Pitt responded that he would take office, but on his own terms, as he made clear to Temple: ‘I stated in general that if the King’s feelings did not point strongly to a change, it was not what we sought. But that if they did, and we could form a permanent system, consistent with our principles, and on public ground, we should not decline it. I reminded him how much I was personally pledged to Parliamentary reform on the principles I had publicly explained, which I should support on every seasonable occasion.’54
Pitt was not ready to abandon the ideals of independence and integrity on which he had set his heart. He did want office, but knew he did not need to trade his opinions in order to get it, also telling Temple, ‘I think … what has passed will not tend to delay our having the offer whenever things are ripe for it.’55
Since it was now July, and Parliament was rising for the summer, there was no prospect of matters ‘ripening’ in the next few months. On 22 July Pitt wrote to his mother from his brother’s house in Savile Street: ‘I resume at last my pen, tho’ with no other Reason than ought to have made me do so every day for this month past. I can indeed hardly make out how that period has slid away, in which I have done little else but ride backwards and forwards between Wimbledon and London, and meditate plans for the summer, till I find the summer half over before I have begun to put any in execution.’56 In early August he was writing from newly fashionable Brighthelmstone, to which he had gone to take ‘some dips’. ‘By all I learnt before I left London, I now think things may possibly go thro’ the rest of the summer as they are, tho’ much longer there is every reason to believe, they will not.’57 In early September he was in Dorset at the house of Henry Bankes, meeting up with Eliot and Wilberforce. The short-sighted Wilberforce was teased for nearly shooting Pitt while aiming at some partridges, but we do not know how close he came to disabling the next Prime Minister.
Wilberforce, Eliot and Pitt had decided to visit France for the early autumn. Before doing so Pitt attended the King’s levée at St James’s. Ever in close touch with Temple, Pitt reported to him: ‘I am still inclined to believe … that the King does not like to hazard dismissing the present Ministry till he has found some ostensible ground of complaint, or till he sees the disposition of Parliament next Session … I am just returned from St. James’s … The King was gracious as usual, and he inquired as to the time of my stay [in France] in a manner which I rather thought significant.’58
Pitt thus departed for France knowing that he might once again be called upon to form a government at any time when he got back. Proximity to political power, however, did anything but bring efficiency to his travelling arrangements. When the three friends met at Sittingbourne ready to cross the Channel they found that each had expected the others to provide the letters of introduction necessary to travel comfortably in a foreign country. Upon receiving a last-minute letter introducing them to a Monsieur Coustier, they headed for his house at Rheims, only to find that he was a grocer with a small shop and one room behind it. ‘For a few days we lived very comfortably together,’ wrote Wilberforce, ‘but no French was learned except from the grammar, we not having a single French acquaintance. At length we desired our friend the épicier to mention us to the Lieutenant of the Police.’59 The policeman thought they were spies, seeing that they were in ‘wretched lodgings’ and had no attendants, but told the local Abbé that these three young men claimed to be ‘grands seigneurs’, and one of them the son of the great Earl of Chatham. Soon Pitt was writing to Harriot: ‘Tomorrow we are to dine at a magnificent Palace of the Archbishop’s … and as a French Abbé is not proverbial for silence, we have an opportunity of hearing something of the language.’60 Pitt learned French quickly, his ear being ‘quick for every sound but music’. He enjoyed the political discussions, telling the Abbé that the first part of the British constitution to decline would be ‘the prerogative of the King and the authority of the House of Peers’. But in a week of staying with the Archbishop, politics was far from their sole concern. Wilberforce noted: ‘N.B. Archbishops in England are not like Archevêques in France; these last are jolly fellows of about forty years of age, who play at billiards, &c. like other people.’61
With news of their presence in France now spreading before them, the three friends went on to Paris, and then on to the vicinity of the French court assembled in Fontainebleau. They were presented to Louis XVI, ‘a clumsy strange figure in immense boots’. Wilberforce describes being ‘every evening at the parties of one or other of the French Ministers, in whose apartments we also dined – the Queen being always among the company present in the evening, and mixing in conversation with the greatest affability’.62 Pitt had a lively time with the Queen, Marie Antoinette, who made fun of the manner of his arrival in France and repeatedly teased him about whether he had heard lately from the grocer. ‘Mr. Pitt,’ Wilberforce reported, ‘though his
imperfect knowledge of French prevented his doing justice to his sentiments, was yet able to give some impression of his superior powers.’ Pitt’s ability to learn quickly and to charm people of every kind in private company was thoroughly on display on the visit to France. He behaved throughout with relaxed good humour, even when the French ‘crowded around Pitt in shoals … he behaved with great spirit although he was sometimes a little bored when they talked to him about the parliamentary reform’.
A second Pitt trait visible on this visit was his lack of interest in proposals of marriage. He was offered the hand of the seventeen-year-old daughter of the fabulously wealthy Jacques Necker, a highly ambitious French politician who would play a significant role in the events of the Revolution. According to Wilberforce: ‘It was suggested to the late Lord Camden by Mr. Walpole, a particular friend of M. Necker’s, that if Mr. Pitt should be disposed to offer his hand to Mademoiselle N … such was the respect entertained for him by M. and Madame Necker, that he had no doubt the proposal would be accepted.’63 It is said that Pitt responded, ‘I am already married to my country,’ but, perhaps fortunately, no definite record of this remains.*
Even on this journey Pitt was more interested in making alliances of another kind: it was another attribute of his that he was a shrewd political talent-spotter. George Rose, the highly able former Secretary to the Treasury, was also travelling in France at the time:
I received a letter from Mr. Pitt at Rheims, desiring I would stay at Paris till he could get to me, which he said he would do as soon as possible. On our meeting, the conversation was quite confidential. In the course of it I found he was as little disposed to future connexion with Lord Shelburne as myself, and he manifested an earnest desire for a permanent and close intimacy with me … Having hesitated only from a consciousness of my own insignificance as to any essential service I could render him … I gave him my hand with a warm and consenting heart. From that moment I considered myself as inalienable from Mr. Pitt, and on that feeling I acted most sacredly to the last hour of his invaluable life.64
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