Similarly, he needed support in Parliament, but while he was highly attentive to young Members who showed promise he did little to cultivate the support of MPs in general. He had no inclination to entertain Members of Parliament on any systematic basis, and only called in at supportive clubs, such as White’s, if he had a specific purpose. Even Goostree’s closed down, probably in part because he never went there. His family tried to remind him of the need to be more sociable, and for a while Harriot’s presence in Downing Street made a big difference. She wrote to her mother on 28 February 1786 that there were to be ‘three or four more Assemblies to take in every Body … And ye Young World are very desirous of it … I hope you will like this Plan, and indeed I believe your having said so much about ye tristesse of our Administration made my Brother think of it.’14 This was Pitt’s answer: hold a few big parties to get the whole business of being sociable with a wider circle over and done with. We should not exaggerate Pitt’s isolation: he attended a large number of official functions, was almost always at the King’s levées, where the court and Ministers congregated, and met many deputations. Much as he did these things, however, he did not seek the continued company or closer friendship of those he met. He preferred to present his face to the world in the one public forum where he naturally cast off all shyness and reserve: the House of Commons. It was only through his eloquence there that he gave public vent to the full range of his personality.
Pitt’s third grouping of associates was the one which every politician needs: a small group of friends, usually acquired before taking office, who overlap the boundary between personal and political life. Such friends provide the opportunity for confidential and disinterested political discussion, and at the same time social companionship. These were the familiar friends from Cambridge and Goostree’s: Wilberforce, Eliot, Bankes, Pratt, Steele and Pretyman. Pitt was not starry-eyed about his friends, and did not usually promote them to high office if he did not think they were up to it. Although he made Steele a Secretary of the Treasury, he would reserve the big leaps in seniority for colleagues who showed the greatest ability, such as Dundas and Grenville. While he successfully secured the Bishopric of Lincoln for Pretyman in 1787, this removed him from the far more influential situation of being Pitt’s de facto private secretary.
In general, however, while Pitt was happy for patronage to be employed in order to bolster his government’s authority and numbers in Parliament, he was less likely than other politicians of his day to seek preferment for his friends. His attempts to promote Pretyman within the Church right up to being Archbishop of Canterbury are something of an exception to this, as is his making his elder brother First Lord of the Admiralty, although he expected the latter to do a job and moved him when he was not sufficiently good at it. Whenever the subject of Pretyman’s preferment came up, Pitt became irrational. As early as January 1783, during his brief first tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he had sought to persuade Shelburne to make Pretyman Dean of Worcester even though he did not qualify on age grounds. It was a matter on which he was ‘firmly anxious to be of all the service in my power to my friend’, and it would ‘oblige me in a point I have extremely at heart’.15 Beyond that, he did not shower his friends with the titles or decorations which he was happy to distribute to others to make his government secure, and it would not have accorded with his treasured concept of incorruptibility to do so. His friends’ understanding of this had a reciprocal side: if they felt strongly about an issue, they were able to differ with him publicly. Many of his close associates, including Wilberforce, Bankes and Rose, voted against him on at least one important occasion. It is a measure of his open mind, pleasant temper and genuine friendship that he did not seem to hold it against them, but the fact that his friends did not receive unfair rewards and were not subject to strict political control probably contributed to the rather weak sense of discipline and loyalty among his wider following. If the Prime Minister’s own closer associates could rebel from time to time, then why on earth couldn’t everyone else?
Nevertheless, these friends were Pitt’s mainstay. Whenever they met in some combination in Downing Street, or Brighton, or Wilberforce’s villa in Wimbledon, Pitt was able to mix ministerial responsibility with social frivolity as he pleased. While his preoccupations and duties had moved on enormously since he had met them, he seemed entirely content with the friends he had. This happy situation could not last. He was to discover in 1786 that even a Prime Minister cannot command his friends never to change, or not to die.
No Prime Minister, then or now, has enjoyed such a thing as a ‘typical’ working day. When he could, Pitt breakfasted in Downing Street at 9 a.m., often with a visitor or a member of the government, but he evidently abandoned this if the pressure of urgent business was too great. He would spend most of the day in committees or other meetings, perhaps taking a ride in St James’s Park, with Rose or Steele or Dundas, around midday. He would eat dinner, as was usual in the eighteenth century, at about five o’clock, often taking some hours over eating and drinking with his close companions, and ‘laying aside all care enjoy their conversation till the evening hour of business arrived’.16 He would return to work, with papers or officials, at about 9 p.m. until late at night. Even when he was staying in Wimbledon with Wilberforce or Dundas, or in his rented house in Putney, Mrs Pretyman Tomline says that ‘the Evenings were usually spent in business. Such for many years was the constant tenor of Mr. Pitt’s life.’17 In practice, given Pitt’s preference for informality and decision-taking in small groups, the boundaries between pleasure and business were less strict than this timetable suggests. The summer recesses in particular provided an opportunity for exactly the type of thinking Pitt liked to do. Dundas recalled that ‘in transacting the business of the State, in forming our plans &c. we never retired to Office for that purpose. All these matters we discussed & settled either in our morning rides at Wimbledon, or in our even’g walks at that place. We were accustomed to walk in the evening from 8 oClock to sometimes 10 or Eleven in the Summer Season.’18 When Parliament was sitting the opposite would apply, as Pitt was often required to be in attendance at the House of Commons throughout the late afternoon and evenings, frequently long into the night.
Every head of government brings his or her own habits and working methods to the job, but for a Prime Minister coming to office in a more modern age there are also certain established ways of conducting and recording business. A new Prime Minister in the twenty-first century inherits a small army of private secretaries and officials who continually take minutes and issue instructions, a Secretary to the Cabinet through whom commands can be given to the entire Civil Service, and an established pattern of meetings through which the heads of all government departments can be commanded or consulted. In Pitt’s day none of these things existed. It was up to a new First Lord of the Treasury to decide for himself what staff he might require, what they would do, and the extent to which he would try to interfere in departments beyond the Treasury.
In the absence of any established system for placing decisions in front of him, Pitt’s continued habit of concentrating on one subject at a time in order to get to the bottom of it led on other subjects to ‘dilatoriness and procrastination, his great vices’, according to Wilberforce. There was no system for dealing with correspondence, but Ministers who were so minded, such as Dundas, Rose and later Grenville, could be very efficient and prompt at getting through it. Not so Pitt, who would simply put letters aside if they were not relevant to the matter at hand or otherwise of interest to him. By today’s standards, of course, he wrote huge numbers of letters, of which thousands still survive, but he did not create a support system able to cope with the vast amount of correspondence received by a head of government in an age when letters were the principal means of communication. He knew this was a fault, writing to Eliot even before he came to power: ‘You have had too much of my Correspondence ever to wonder at its want of Punctuality,’19 but simply lived with the pro
blem throughout his life. He once wrote to Wilberforce: ‘By the simple operation of putting off only from one day to the next, I have now been some months without writing to you.’20 A Russian envoy who gave Grenville some papers to show to Pitt asked him not to leave them with him, ‘for he will not be able to find them again a day later among the immense mass of papers which reach him from all sides and encumber all his tables and desks’.21 Requests for honours were particularly likely to sit at the bottom of a pile for many months, often causing great offence to MPs, Ambassadors, and aristocratic families. Undoubtedly Pitt felt he would catch up with everything whenever there was a break in the pressure of business, but since no break ever came he never did catch up. George III ‘observed that Mr. Pitt was apt to put off laborious or disagreeable business to the last’, and would eventually go through it ‘with extraordinary rapidity’ in an ‘irregular mixture of delay and hurry’.22
It may be wondered how someone who so neglected important correspondence and showed no interest in courting social connections could possibly survive as head of the government in the eighteenth century, let alone become the second-longest-serving holder of that position in the whole of British history.* The answer lay in his thorough and comprehensive grasp of each subject which did grab his attention, the impressive way in which he conducted the business of government in meetings, the energy which he brought to pursuing his main objectives, and his ability – most of the time – to dominate and dazzle the House of Commons. His friends and supporters ended up forgiving him his faults because of the strength of his compensating qualities, but they sometimes found it a sore trial. As Sir James Harris would complain after Pitt had appointed him Ambassador to The Hague: ‘is it impossible to move him who speaks so well to write one poor line …?’23 The result of this inattention to correspondence was that Pitt often had to dash off letters of apology, such as one assuring his banker Thomas Coutts that he had not intended ‘any mark of neglect or disregard towards you’, and that his complete failure to reply to letters was the result of ‘pressure of business and from no other motive’.24
In office Pitt found it steadily harder to travel. He rarely went further than Somerset, a journey he would make once or twice a year to visit his mother, but often his planned expeditions in that or other directions were postponed or cancelled through the pressure of events. He occasionally went to Cambridge, although the university made few demands on him as a constituency, and he would become High Steward of the University, an honorary and ceremonial role, in 1790. He liked to go shooting, which he could do at Rutland’s estate, Cheveley, in conjunction with a visit to Cambridge, or at Bankes’s property in Dorset on the way to or from Somerset. He made such journeys by carriage, although he occasionally rode on horseback to and from Cambridge. For the greater part of the time his duties kept him in or near to London, and it was therefore near London that he looked for a more permanent and substantial rural retreat than the house he had rented on Putney Heath.
While licking his political wounds in August 1785 Pitt had the chance to buy Holwood House near Bromley in Kent, a former hunting lodge, not far from his birthplace and about fifteen miles from Westminster. He bought it along with the neighbouring two-hundred-acre farm for a little under £7,000 (£675,000 would be the equivalent in 2004), taking on a £4,000 mortgage. This was a lot of money for Pitt, although it brought him what was only a modest residence by the standards of the politicians of the day, with six bedrooms in total; Harriot thought it was ideal for her unsociable brother in being ‘a small House which will not allow of many Visitors’. He added a single-storey dining room, but would later abandon plans for more ambitious expansion of the building as his debts mounted. From November 1785 he went there, Pretyman recalled, ‘upon every opportunity, but rarely without a friend or two, and in general some person in office joined him there, that business and recreation might be mixed’.25
Pitt had fixed ideas about the nature of his recreation. According to Pretyman he not only had no ear for music, ‘nor had he much taste for Drawings or Paintings. He was more attentive to Architecture and used sometimes, in the early part of his life, to amuse himself with drawing a plan of the best possible House.’26 Like his father, he enjoyed rearranging the landscape and creating new vistas, levelling and planting an iron-age camp, creating new walks, digging out a pond, and employing large numbers of labourers without regard to the cost. ‘After toiling in his room over revenue details or foreign dispatches … he would walk out, and taking his spade in his hand grub up a thistle or a weed, or give directions about the removal of a shrub, or the turning of a walk, with as much earnestness and interest as if he had nothing else to occupy his thoughts.’27 This process of ‘improvement’ went on for many years, with Pitt and any unlucky visitors occasionally joining in the effort. Mornington recalled him ‘working in his woods and gardens with his labourers, for whole days together, undergoing considerable bodily fatigue, and with so much eagerness and assiduity, that you would suppose the cultivation of his villa to be the principal occupation of his life’.28 For Pitt it was vital to maintain some sort of contact with rural activity – he had over two hundred sheep on the farm – and to have a ready retreat from Westminster. With its commanding views over the Kent countryside, Holwood became his favourite haunt throughout his first seventeen years as Prime Minister.*
Initially, Pitt does not seem to have expected the purchase and development of Holwood to have caused him any financial difficulty, and at the same time he did not hesitate to send large sums of money to the aid of his mother. By the mid-1780s the annuity conferred on her by the King had fallen seriously into arrears. As First Lord of the Treasury Pitt was eventually able to set that right, but putting the appropriate fund onto a sustainable basis took some time, and in the meantime he personally sent whatever was necessary to relieve his mother’s anxiety. ‘As to the £2000 you mentioned,’ he says in a letter of December 1785, ‘I have only to entreat you not to suffer a moment’s uneasiness on that account. I can arrange that with Mr. Coutts without difficulty, and without its coming across any convenience or Pleasure of my own; tho none I could have would be so great as to be able to spare you a moment of trouble or anxiety. If Mr. Coutts wishes any further security for the 700£ which you mention as due to Him, it will also be very easy to settle that to his satisfaction.’29 Such things, he said, in another letter, would be no difficulty to him: ‘The income of the Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer together will really furnish more than my Expenses can require.’30
Pitt’s combined salaries totalled nearly £7,000 a year (and would increase to nearly £10,000 in 1792, when the King insisted he take the office of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports). This was a handsome sum for those days, and should have allowed him to live reasonably comfortably, but not extravagantly, while permitting a fair amount of entertainment, maintenance of horses, and travel. For three reasons, however, Pitt’s income never remotely kept up with his expenses. First, he had no capital, and in 1786 he ensured he never would have any by transferring to his mother the sum of £5,800 which he was meant to one day receive out of his inheritance from his father. He was able to give her this sum by raising a loan on his share of Burton Pynsent and then paying the interest on her behalf. Secondly, he had been borrowing from 1780 onwards, since completing the purchase of his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, and had repeatedly taken on new loans in order to repay old ones. John Ehrman has calculated that by 1787 Pitt was paying interest on a total of nearly £16,000, including the mortgage of Holwood.
Thirdly, despite balancing the nation’s books with great precision, creativity and care, Pitt had not the slightest interest in monitoring his own finances while he was in office. This is a common fault among politicians, many of whom to this day barely trouble to look at their bank balance until they are out of power. Personal finances can easily seem a matter of petty detail to someone who holds the whole nation’s affairs in his hands. Additionally, Pitt had never witnessed his
father being troubled for a second by any thought of where money might come from.
In Pitt’s defence, he was still only in his mid-twenties, and many people of that age are happy to borrow large amounts, confident that they can repay it in the infinity of life which stretches before them. He knew he had a substantial salary as Prime Minister, and that if he lost office his services would be much sought after at the Bar. He might also have thought that the delays in receiving his salary from the Treasury, often amounting to about twelve months, were contributing to his growing debts. Yet by the autumn of 1785 he could see that his financial affairs were running out of control, and, lacking the time or the patience to sort them out himself, he asked his friend Bob Smith, a banker and now MP for Nottingham, to work out where his money was going.
The results were horrifying. Smith soon found forgotten and unpaid bills amounting to £7,914, more than Pitt’s annual income. Smith told Wilberforce that the bills for provisions ‘exceed anything I could have imagined’, and generally increased when Pitt was away from home, suggesting that his servants were regularly robbing him. The meat bill for January 1785 was £96, which in the prices of the day represented approximately 1.7 tonnes of meat. Pitt was also spending £1,000 or £2,000 a year on wine, but this paled into insignificance in comparison to the expense of running his stables, which for the three years from July 1783 to July 1786 had cost £37,930. This was a vast sum, probably sufficient to run a sizeable racing stable, which Pitt certainly did not possess. Ehrman has concluded that Pitt was being ‘grossly cheated’.
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 25