William Pitt the Younger: A Biography

by William Hague

  In that spirit, and with that knowledge, Pitt once again received from George III the seals of office as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, on 18 May 1804. Just short of his forty-fifth birthday, he returned to office as by far the most experienced Minister in the land. On the same day in Paris, the thirty-five-year-old Napoleon was proclaimed hereditary Emperor of the French. From a position of political weakness and personal frailty, Pitt now had to take on the greatest military genius in the world as he approached the peak of his power.

  26

  Back, But Never the Same

  ‘I have received a broad hint to retire after this recent experiment. I beg leave to say, broad as the hint may be, it is not broad enough for me to take it.’

  WILLIAM PITT, HOUSE OF COMMONS, 18 JUNE 18041

  ‘I felt it my duty frequently to urge the necessity of his retiring from public business altogether, but Mr. Pitt’s memorable reply was, that his Country needed his Services, & he would rather prefer to die at his Post, than desert it.’

  SIR WALTER FARQUHAR2

  PITT SEEMED CONFIDENT IN MAY 1804 that he could once again overcome a good deal of initial hostility and consolidate his position at the head of government. He was no doubt mindful that on the previous occasion he had taken office as Prime Minister, over twenty years before, he had turned scepticism into adulation and defeat into a triumph. He could reflect, too, that this time he was free of many of the great obstacles he had faced on the former occasion. Then he had been an untried twenty-four-year-old with no majority in the Commons who had been assisted into office by means considered by many to be a constitutional outrage. Now he was a statesman of international standing, with immense experience of peace and war, and with at least a small, if untested, parliamentary majority.

  Yet the reality was that not only Pitt’s personal resilience but also his political position was fundamentally weaker in several respects than the one he had enjoyed in 1783. For one thing, there had been no doubt at the beginning of his first premiership that he enjoyed the resolute backing of a wily monarch whose reign could still last for decades. The position now was starkly different. George III was sixty-five years old, and was suffering from increasingly frequent bouts of insanity. Always strong-willed, after forty-three years on the throne his patience had become thin and his attention span erratic. Even when he was meant to be sane, his behaviour was often strange – in late May 1804 he responded to a cheering crowd of Eton boys by saying that ‘in future he should be an Anti-Westminster’,3 insulting a rival school in a manner not normally befitting a King. At the prorogation of Parliament that July he missed out a page of the speech Pitt had prepared for him, shortening it by about a quarter, while his audience affected not to have noticed.

  Amidst these small but abundant signs of decay, it is not surprising that politicians gathered ever more earnestly at Carlton House around the Prince of Wales, with even Grenville now joining Fox, Grey, Fitzwilliam and Moira among his key advisers. The real power of politicians always depends not on the station they presently hold, but on the general expectation of their future influence. Pitt could not command a majority in the Commons on the basis of an assured future, nor through a personal following he had never cultivated: opposed by the parties of Fox, Grenville and Addington, he depended on those MPs who automatically adhered to the King’s ministry. As a result the King’s condition had a tangible effect on the true power Pitt exercised, encouraging opposition, discouraging younger Members from hitching their star to his, and even affecting the readiness of foreign governments to make diplomatic commitments.

  Pitt’s dependence on a royal power which was losing its force was that much greater because there were conceivable alternatives to him, whereas George III had been left with nowhere else at all to turn in 1783. To Fox, he had ‘surrendered himself up entirely into the hands of the Court’,4 while Pitt considered himself to have properly come to office at the request of the King. The truth was that George III had been very reluctant to part with Addington, and felt neither the need nor the wish to deploy his powers of patronage as unswervingly in Pitt’s favour as had been the case in the crisis of 1783–84. Determined to have his way on matters affecting his own household, he made some changes to positions such as those of Lords of the Bedchamber* (including dismissing Lord Amherst for not voting with Addington), which Pitt had to struggle to counteract in order to avoid embarrassment. It always made Pitt ‘bilious’ to spend hours on appointments to sinecures in which he was not personally interested, but it was a small sign of things to come that much time in the opening weeks of his new administration had to be devoted to keeping such matters in order.

  The weaknesses of Pitt’s position extended beyond matters of monarchy. In 1783 he had faced a hostile Commons with an ace in his pocket – the threat of a general election which would unseat many of his opponents. In 1804 this card was both of lower value and harder to play: a general election would probably not produce much change in the parliamentary balance, given the absence of such clear-cut issues as those prevailing in 1784, and the dissolution of a Parliament only two years old would have been difficult to justify. Pitt’s power was greater when he faced a hostile majority which could be reversed than it would be now, dependent on a small majority in a House he could not change.

  As in 1783, Pitt was to lead a government in which he carried a disproportionate burden of the work on his own shoulders. His undistinguished Cabinet of 1783 had sat in the House of Lords while he handled the Commons himself with only Dundas to give material assistance (and Dundas was not initially in the Cabinet). In 1804, Castlereagh was the only Cabinet Minister by Pitt’s side in the Commons. Pitt would therefore once again take upon himself the management of a fractious assembly, but at a time when he was two decades older, with far less stamina and with a war to conduct at the same time. Canning bemoaned the ‘narrow, shabby government’ – partly because he was not put in the Cabinet himself – and told his wife that the Cabinet were widely laughed at.

  In fact, the Cabinet of 1804 should be judged stronger than that of 1783. Six of the Addington Cabinet remained in office, including two future First Lords of the Treasury, Hawkesbury as Home Secretary and Portland as Lord President. Eldon remained Lord Chancellor, while Westmorland, Chatham and Castlereagh continued as Lord Privy Seal, Master General of the Ordnance and President of the Board of Control respectively. Melville and Camden were the old warhorses who returned with Pitt, the former as First Lord of the Admiralty and the latter as Secretary of State for War. Mulgrave became Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Pitt made his old friend Dudley Ryder, now Lord Harrowby, Foreign Secretary, a position which he took on with great misgivings, ‘but his friendship for Pitt made him not hesitate in accepting it’.5 The Cabinet was thus not undistinguished or incompetent, but it was a far cry from the combination of Fox, Spencer, Grenville, Windham and Fitzwilliam along with the best of his loyalists that Pitt had originally envisaged.

  A further weakening factor from the very outset was that Pitt’s final attacks on the Addington administration and calls for a more vigorous prosecution of the war had created high expectations of the actions he would now take. In 1783, merely staying in office and managing the nation’s recovery from war constituted success; in 1804 Pitt was expected to surpass his predecessor in waging war, defending the country against imminent invasion, constructing new alliances and obtaining all the necessary finance on top of the vast amount spent since 1793. It is no wonder that there were some reports of him wearing a miserable countenance. Wilberforce noted ‘Pitt not in spirits’6 in July, and the admittedly partisan Grey wrote that ‘He looked very miserable … I would rather be any man in England than him.’7 John Ehrman has drawn attention to the consistent accounts of Pitt’s distraction and unhappiness on 31 August 1804 – one official apparently finding him ‘completely under the influence of anxiety & dejection’, and another observer finding him wandering alone early in the morning in St James’s
Park ‘looking like death with his eyes staring out of his head and steadfastly fixed on the ground’.8 Lady Hester Stanhope’s account of Pitt’s day is suggestive only of the normal business of government, but on a sick man it would have taken a heavy toll:

  In town, during the sitting of parliament, what a life was his! Roused from his sleep (for he was a good sleeper) with a despatch from Lord Melville; – then down to Windsor; then, if he had half an hour to spare, trying to swallow something: – Mr. Adams with a paper, Mr. Long with another; then Mr. Rose: then, with a little bottle of cordial confection in his pocket, off to the House until three or four in the morning; then home to a hot supper for two or three hours more, to talk over what was to be done next day: – and wine, and wine! – Scarcely up next morning, when rat tat-tat – twenty or thirty people one after another, and the horses walking before the door from two ’til sunset, waiting for him. It was enough to kill a man – it was murder!9

  Yet equally, there are clear accounts of Pitt retaining his qualities of good humour and playfulness in private even through these times – perhaps justifying Dundas’s analysis that he was ‘either in a garret or a cellar’. Since he was now unable to escape London for Walmer Castle very often, Pitt rented a house on the familiar territory of Putney Heath, where he could obtain at least a little of the rural atmosphere which was so essential to him. There he was visited by an initially awestruck William Napier (later General Sir William Napier), a friend of the Stanhopes. Napier was struck by Pitt’s ‘gentle good nature’,10 and left an enduring portrait of the two sides of his personality:

  Mr. Pitt liked practical fun, and used to riot in it with Lady Hester, Charles and James Stanhope, and myself, and one instance is worth noticing. We were resolved to blacken his face with burnt cork, which he most strenuously resisted, but at the beginning of the fray a servant announced that Lords Castlereagh and Liverpool desired to see him on business. ‘Let them wait in the other room,’ was the answer; and the great Minister instantly turned to the battle, catching up a cushion and belabouring us with it in glorious fun. We were, however, too many and strong for him, and, after at least a ten minutes’ fight, got him down and were actually daubing his face, when, with a look of pretended confidence in his prowess, he said, ‘Stop, this will do; I could easily beat you all, but we must not keep those grandees waiting any longer.’ His defeat was, however, palpable, and we were obliged to get a towel and basin of water to wash him clean before he could receive the grandees. Being thus put in order, the basin was hid behind the sofa, and the two lords were ushered in. Then a new phase of Mr. Pitt’s manner appeared, to my great surprise and admiration. Lord Liverpool’s look and manner are well known – melancholy, bending, nervous. Lord Castlereagh I had known from my childhood, had often been engaged with him in athletic sports, pitching the stone or bar, and looked upon him as what indeed he was, a model of quiet grace and strength combined. What was my surprise to see both him and Lord Liverpool bending like spaniels on approaching the man we had just been maltreating with such successful insolence of fun! but instantly Mr. Pitt’s change of manner and look entirely fixed my attention. His tall, ungainly, bony figure seemed to grow to the ceiling, his head was thrown back, his eyes fixed immovably in one position, as if reading the heavens, and totally regardless of the bending figures near him. For some time they spoke; he made now and then some short observation, and finally, with an abrupt stiff inclination of the body, but without casting his eyes down, dismissed them. Then, turning to us with a laugh, caught up his cushions and renewed our fight.11

  Pitt maintained throughout his life a rigid distinction between his public bearing and his private entertainment: when Napier saw him in the distance on Horseguards Parade he received a look which ‘emphatically spoke … “pass on, this is no place for fooling.”’12 But in both spheres the strain was visible. In public people noticed his regular coughs and yellowing complexion. In private, Napier noted: ‘Mr. Pitt used to come home to dinner rather exhausted, and seemed to require wine, port, of which he generally drank a bottle, or nearly so, in a rapid succession of glasses; but when he recovered his strength from this stimulant he ceased to drink.’13 The signs of alcoholism were all too plain.

  As soon as Pitt was back in Downing Street the pressures were unrelenting. On 5 June Fox himself visited Pitt in the company of Robert Livingston, the American envoy in Paris. Livingston, a well-known republican, claimed to bring a peace proposal from France, but Pitt, sceptical about further agreements with Napoleon, concluded that if the French were serious they ‘would have found some less exceptionable channel of communication’.14

  Parliamentary time was initially taken up by a further attempt by Wilberforce to achieve the gradual abolition of the slave trade theoretically agreed on by the Commons twelve years before. Once again, Pitt spoke strongly in favour of ‘abolishing that inhuman traffic’,15 but the effort, endorsed by the Commons, yet again ran aground in the Lords. As ever, in the coming months Pitt considered lack of Cabinet unity and the extent of royal hostility on the question of slave-trade abolition to be too great to overcome. By the following February he was imploring Wilberforce not to make a further attempt; Wilberforce disregarded him and was defeated. To the end of his life Pitt would remain hamstrung on this issue because the people he depended on for wider support did not share his abolitionist instincts. There must have been a strong chance, however, that he could have forced the issue had he mustered the energy and time to do so.

  The principal early initiative of Pitt’s new ministry was the Additional Force Bill, outlined to the Commons by Pitt on the same day he met Fox to discuss peace. The Bill represented Pitt’s attempt to implement the better distribution of the armed forces he had so recently and vociferously demanded from the back benches. The size of the regular army would be permanently increased and that of the militia reduced, enabling him to create a fairer system of recruiting and ultimately have greater forces available for service overseas. Since it was the only major piece of legislation the government would present in 1804 before Parliament rose for the summer, and all the opposition groupings of Fox, Grenville and Addington managed to find fault with it, the debates on the Bill became the key test of the strength of the new government. When the second reading of the Bill was carried on 5 June by only forty votes (221 to 181) it was clear that Pitt’s control of Parliament would require great and regular effort. Rose’s forebodings were well founded: the opposition groupings were strong in number and ruthless in behaviour, all of them harbouring their own jealousies and resentments about Pitt’s return.

  The record of the third reading debate on 18 June is instructive for three reasons. First, the maximum effort of the government’s side and a huge turnout of MPs still produced a broadly similar result, with a majority of forty-two (265 to 223). Second, much of Pitt’s own speech was defensive in the wake of incessant attacks. He not only spent considerable time defending his proposals, but felt it necessary to justify his right to be in office and to underline his determination to remain there. In complete consistency with his long-held view, he defended ‘the principle, that it is the prerogative of his Majesty to choose his ministers’,16 and in a mood of defiance which echoed early 1784 he made clear that he would not take the ‘broad hint’ to retire. If the Bill was defeated he would ‘merely treat it as the decision of this house on the dry merits of the bill’.17 Third, his new Cabinet was too fragile for the unguarded and inflammatory language of Canning, who also spoke in that day’s debate. He attacked the record of the previous administration with no regard to the fact that many of its members had been appointed to the new one. The Home Secretary, Hawkesbury, handed in his resignation, and Pitt had to turn his time and his charm to getting him to withdraw it.

  Much of this was, of course, nothing more than politics as usual, but it underscored the difficulty for Pitt of meeting high expectations of a vigorous war effort when he had to spend a large amount of his time dealing with a divided Parliament and a j
ittery Cabinet. The Additional Force Bill would prove to be little more successful in producing the right numbers and balance of soldiers than the efforts by Addington which Pitt had so scathingly assaulted. Yet there is no doubt that Pitt’s arrival in Downing Street gave a new tempo to some much-needed preparations: Melville and the Admiralty rapidly improved the navy’s fighting condition, while Pitt himself oversaw improvements to the defences of south-east England.

  Invasion fears once again reached fever pitch in late July when Napoleon sited himself at Boulogne. His plans for an attack on England were sufficiently advanced for the commemorative medal for the troops to be struck. Nevertheless, British skill in blockading French warships in their ports and the sudden death of a key French Admiral denied Napoleon even the briefest opportunity to cross the Channel. As he himself had put it, ‘Let us be masters of the Channel for six hours, and we are masters of the world.’18 But the Channel remained unsubdued.

  As the autumn of 1804 advanced, Pitt divided his time between Downing Street and Putney Heath. The extended stays in the sea air at Walmer, which had done much to improve his health the previous year, had gone forever. His greatest preoccupation was one familiar to him from the 1790s: British forces were distinguishing themselves in the West Indies and India, but the absence of deployments and allies on the Continent of Europe meant that France could not be defeated. Pitt’s notes of the time reveal his now entrenched mistrust of Napoleon’s character – ‘The arrogance, the presumption, the self-will of unlimited and idolized power … the restless and incessant activity of guilty but unsated ambition’19 – and show his thoughts turning to the creation of a new alliance with Austria and, in particular, Russia. Britain and Russia, he thought, were ‘the only Powers that for many years can have no jealousy or opposite interests’.20