William Pitt and national revival

On 26th April 1773 Pitt’s name was entered at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge; and he commenced residence there on 8th October 1772. His health being ever a matter of grave concern, Wilson stayed with him in order to prevent any boyish imprudences and accompany him in riding. But all precautions were in vain. Despite the invigorating influences of sea-air at Lyme Regis, where William and his brother had stayed from June up to 21st September, he soon fell ill at Cambridge, and remained in bed for several weeks. Thanks to the medical skill of Drs. Addington and Glynn (the former an old friend of Chatham), he gradually got the better of the hereditary foe, gout; but the letters which passed between Lady Chatham and Wilson attest the severity of the seizure. The boy seems to have won the love of his medical attendants, as appears from this sentence in her letter of 22nd November. “What a gift William has to conciliate the love of those who are once acquainted with him.”

There is a story told to Thomas Moore by the Bishop of Bath and Wells, that Pitt brought his nurse with him in the carriage to Cambridge, and that she stayed to look after him. This strange assertion is made in the poet’s diary for 13th February 1826; and the distrust which that late date inspires is increased when we find that the Bishop had the anecdote from Paley, who “was very near being his [Pitt’s] tutor, instead of Pretyman, but Paley did not like it.”56 As Paley was at Christ’s, and there never was any question of Pitt entering at that college or receiving from the outset regular instruction outside the walls of Pembroke, the story lacks every element of credibility.

The facts are as follows: Mrs. Sparry, who was attendant or housekeeper at Burton Pynsent, went to Cambridge to nurse the boy through his long and serious illness, and finally brought him home. At last the invalid was strong enough to bear the journey. Four days were taken up in reaching London; and we find him writing thence to his mother on 6th December that he had not been fatigued and felt strong enough to walk all the way home; but, he added, Mrs. Sparry urged him not to write much.57 He did not return to Cambridge (“the evacuated seat of the Muses” as Chatham styled it) until 13th July 1774. Then he informed Lady Chatham that Cambridge was empty, that Dr. Glynn had called on him and had inquired after Mrs. Sparry, who would be glad to hear that the bed at his rooms had been well aired. These trifles enable us to reduce the oft quoted nurse story to its proper insignificance.

Wilson seems to have done his best to amuse his charge in the dreary vacation time of July–September 1774; for on 24th August Pitt described to his mother a ride in which Wilson and he had lost their way among lanes and fields and regained the track with some damage to hedges, and after a chase of one of the steeds, but far too late to share in college dinner. Again, on 1st September, he wrote to the Earl of Chatham: “The ardour for celebrating this day is as great at Cambridge as anywhere; and Mr. Wilson himself, catching a spark of it, signalized himself by killing a crow on the wing after a walk of six hours.”58

The natural vivacity of disposition, which charmed all his friends, must have played no small part in the recovery of his health. The medical authorities of to-day would also probably assign more importance to regular hours, exercise, and careful diet than to the use of port wine, adopted in compliance with his physicians’ recommendation, on which some contemporary writers dwell with much gusto. Certain it is that from the year 1774 onwards “his health became progressively confirmed.”

This phrase occurs in the biography of Pitt written by his college tutor, Dr. Pretyman, whose style it aptly characterizes. The book is indeed one of the most ponderous ever published. As tutor, friend, and adviser, the Rev. Dr. Pretyman had unique opportunities for giving to the world a complete and life-like portrait. Pitt was entrusted to his care and to that of his colleague, Dr. Turner, in 1773–4, and thereafter to Pretyman alone. The undergraduate soon conceived for him an affection which was strong and lasting. Their intercourse suffered little interruption, not even from the ecclesiastical honours which the young Prime Minister so freely bestowed on his old tutor. The bishop, who in 1803 took the name of Tomline, continued to be the friend and adviser of the Statesman up to the dreary days which succeeded the death-blow of Austerlitz. Pitt died in his arms, and he was his literary executor. Yet, despite the mass of materials put into his hands (or was it because of their mass?)59 he wrote one of the dullest biographies in the English language.

The solution of the riddle may perhaps be found in the cast of his mind, which was that of a mathematician and divine, while it lacked the gifts of interest in men and affairs, of insight into character, of delicate and instinctive sympathy, and of historic imagination, which enliven, reveal, interpret, and illuminate personalities and situations. Talleyrand, with a flash of almost diabolical wit, once described language as a means of concealing thought. Tomline, with laboured conscientiousness, seems to have looked on biography as a means of concealing character. Certainly he portrayed only those features which are easily discernible in the tomes of the Parliamentary History. An almost finnikin scrupulousness clogged him in the exercise of the scanty powers of portraiture with which Nature had endowed him. The biographer was continually being reined in by the literary executor, the result being a progress, which, while meant to be stately, succeeds only in being shambling. Here and there we catch glimpses of Pitt under the senatorial robes with which his friend adorned and concealed him, but they are tantalizingly brief. The Bishop was beset by so many qualms concerning the propriety of mentioning this or that incident as to “suppress many circumstances and anecdotes of a more private nature,” and to postpone the compilation of a volume on this more frivolous subject. Death supervened while the Bishop was still revolving the question of the proprieties; and we shall therefore never fully know Pitt as he appeared to his life-long counsellor.60

There must have been sterling qualities in the man whom the statesman thus signally honoured. Dr. Pretyman’s learning was vast. Senior Wrangler and Fellow of his College, he also became a Fellow of the Royal Society; and his attainments in the classics enabled him to command the respect of his pupil in a sphere where, according to Wilson, Pitt had the Platonic gift, not of learning, but of instinctive remembrance (ἀνάμνησις). Nevertheless, nearly all contemporaries seem to have found in the tutor and Bishop a primness and austerity which were far from attractive. Perhaps he lacked the vitality which might have energized that mass of learning. Or else the consciousness that he was a Senior Wrangler, together with the added load of tutorial and episcopal responsibility, may have been too much for him. To Pitt, nurtured amidst the magniloquence of Hayes and Burton Pynsent, the seriousness and pedantry of Pretyman doubtless appeared natural and pleasing. To outsiders they were tedious; and the general impression of half-amused, half-bored wonderment is cleverly, though spitefully, expressed in the lines of the Rolliad:

Among the most interesting parts of the bishop’s biography of Pitt are those in which he describes his attainments, and his studies at Pembroke Hall. The tutor found him, as Wilson expected, exceedingly well versed in the classics, so that he seldom met with any difficulties. Chatham had prescribed a careful study of Thucydides and Polybius; and the young undergraduate was often able, with little or no preparation, to translate six or seven pages of the former historian, without making more than one or two mistakes. This is very remarkable in a youth of fifteen; but his sense of the meaning and fitness of words seems to have been not less instinctive than his choice of language, which was soon to arouse the wonder and admiration of the most experienced debaters at Westminster.

As regards his mathematical attainments, Tomline states that he had already read the first six books of Euclid, and had mastered the elementary parts of Algebra, Trigonometry, and Natural Philosophy. The bent of his mind was towards the Humanities; but he had a good hold on mathematics, and became expert at the solution of problems. Newton’s Principia aroused his deepest admiration. Various notes on mathematical and astronomical subjects extant in the Pitt Papers (too fragmentary for reproduction here) show that he retained his interest in the exact sciences.62

At Cambridge, above all, he deepened his knowledge of the classics. The ease with which he deciphered so obscure a work as Lycophron’s “Cassandra” astonished even those who were familiar with his exceptional powers. Everything therefore conduced to give him an exceedingly wide and thorough knowledge of the literatures of Greece and Rome; for, fortunately for him, he had neither the need nor the inclination to bestow much time on the art of versifying in those languages, which absorbed, and still absorbs, so much of the energy of the dwellers by the Cam. Accordingly the life, thought, and statecraft of Athens and Rome became thoroughly familiar to him. His love for their masterpieces of art and imagination was profound; and the many comments in his handwriting on the margin of the chief authors suffice to refute the gibe of certain small-minded opponents, that he kept up his acquaintance with the classics in order to find tags for his speeches.63 To some extent, it is true, his studies were directed towards his future vocation. At the wish of the Earl of Chatham, he bestowed great attention on the oratory of the ancients; and he seems to have bettered the precept by making critical notes on the speeches which he read, and remarking how the various arguments were, or might be, answered. Add to this a close and loving perusal of Shakespeare and Milton, and it will be seen that Pitt’s studies at Cambridge were such as invigorated the mind, cultivated his oratorical gift, and thoroughly equipped him for the parliamentary arena.

From Tomline we glean a few details which enable us to picture the young undergraduate in his surroundings. He states that his manners even at that early age were formed and his behaviour manly, that he mixed in conversation with unaffected vivacity and perfect ease. His habits were most regular; he never failed to attend morning and evening chapel except when prevented by ill health. Owing to his father’s habit of reading aloud a chapter of the Bible every day, his knowledge of the Holy Scripture was unusually good. Tomline mentions a circumstance which will serve also to illustrate Pitt’s powers of memory and fine sense of sound. On hearing his former tutor read portions of Scripture in support of his “Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles,” the statesman (it was in that anxious year, 1797) stopped him at one text with the remark—“I do not recollect that passage in the Bible, and it does not sound like Scripture.” He was right: the passage came from the Apocrypha, which he had not read.

The singular correctness of Pitt’s life while at Cambridge exposed him to the risk of becoming a bookworm and a prig. From this he was saved by his good sense and his ill-health. “The wonderful boy” was begged by his parents not to court the Muses too assiduously. Chatham’s fatherly anxiety and his love of classical allusions led him to run this metaphor to death; but the strained classicisms had the wished for effect. Pitt rode regularly and far. In the Pitt Papers (No. 221) I have found proof that, while at Cambridge, he was trained in the then essential art of fencing. At a later date his old fencing-master, Peter Renaud, sent to him a petition stating that he had “had the honour of teaching you when you was at Pembroke College,” and that in consequence of the decline in the habit of fencing, he was now in poverty, and therefore begged for help from his illustrious pupil.

We clutch at these trifles which show the drift of Pitt’s early habits; for the worthy Tomline, who had stacks, where we have only sheaves, does not condescend to notice them. From the Pitt Papers we can, however, in part reconstruct his Cambridge life. In his first term, Pitt described Pembroke as “a sober, staid college, and nothing but solid study there.” Fortunately, too, no exceptional privileges were accorded to Chatham’s favourite son. The father in his letter to the tutor had not claimed any, except those required on the score of health. Consequently though Pitt had the right to don the gorgeous gown of a “gentleman-commoner” (afterwards called “fellow commoner”), he did not do so. In his first letter to his father he stated that his cap was “to be stripped of its glories, in exchange for a plain loop and button.”64 It is further pleasing to know that his father wished him not to make use of that tattered mediaeval privilege which allowed sons of noblemen to receive the degree without sitting for examination; and that persistent ill-health alone led him to resort unwillingly to this miserable expedient.

We are here reminded of Wordsworth’s reference to the sense of social equality to be found at Cambridge, even at a time when titled arrogance and old-world subservience ramped and cringed unchecked and unrelieved in most parts of the land. The lines are worthy of quotation because they show that the spirit prevalent at Cambridge, at least at St. John’s College, prepared the poet to sympathize with the French democracy. He speaks of Cambridge as

We do not know whether Pitt’s feelings at this time were akin to those of Wordsworth, who entered St. John’s in 1787. Pitt’s surroundings were not such as to favour the infiltration of new ideas. In his first two years he mixed scarcely at all with undergraduates, and even after 1776 his circle seems to have been limited, doubtless owing to his intense shyness, ill-health, and constant association with Dr. Pretyman. On 4th November 1776 he writes home that he had been spending a few days at the house of Lord Granby (the future Duke of Rutland), and had returned to the “sober hours and studies” of college; but he rarely refers to pastimes and relaxations.

His letters also contain few references to study; but one of these is worthy of notice. On 10th November 1776 he asked permission to attend a month’s course of lectures on Civil Law for the fee of five guineas; and later on he stated that they were “instructive and amusing,” besides requiring little extra work. In that term he took his degree in the manner aforesaid. Early in 1777 he moved to other rooms which were small but perfectly sheltered from wind and weather. About that time, too, he launched out more freely into social life, so we may judge from the not infrequent requests for increased supplies. On 30th June 1777 he writes that he has exceeded his allowance by £60, the first sign of that heedlessness in money matters which was to hamper him through life.

The chief feature of interest in these early letters is the frequent references to the politics of the time, which show that he kept the service of his country steadily in view. Thus, on 23rd March 1775 during vacation time at Hayes, he writes to his brother, begging him, if he leaves his pillow before noon, to find out the fate of Mr. Burke’s motion on behalf of conciliation with America. He signs the letters on behalf of “the Society at Hayes,” possibly a reference to a family debating club.65 It is noteworthy that the struggle of the American colonists with George III was the first political event to arouse his interest, which must have been heightened by the fervid speeches of Chatham on the subject. A little later a side eddy must have set in, for his elder brother, Lord Pitt, on receiving his commission in 1774, joined his regiment, which was quartered successively at Quebec and Montreal. On 31st May 1775 William writes from Cambridge that the papers are full of the bad news from Boston, doubtless the fight at Lexington. Ten days later he requests Lady Chatham to send, along with the “Ethics,” Davenant on “Peace, War, and Alliance,” as it is not in any library in Cambridge. Clearly, then, the youth was alive to the legal and international questions then at stake.

Probably these wider interests carried him more into society. His friendship with Lord Granby, then an undergraduate, is more than once referred to; and thus was formed that connection which furthered Pitt’s career, and led to the sending of Lord Granby (after succeeding to the Dukedom of Rutland) to the Viceregal Lodge at Dublin. The Duke, it may be mentioned, bequeathed to Pitt the sum of £3,000.66 Friendships formed at the University counted for much in times when court and governmental influence made or marred a man’s career. We may therefore note that as Pitt’s health improved during the last years at Cambridge, he also became friendly with the following: Lord Westmorland, Lord Euston, Lowther (Lord Lonsdale), Pratt (Lord Camden), Pepper Arden, Eliot, Bankes, Long, and St. John.

The name of him who was perhaps Pitt’s dearest friend is here conspicuous by its absence. Wilberforce saw little of Pitt at Cambridge, partly, perhaps, because he did not enter at St. John’s College until 1776 and then became associated with a dissolute set; but he made Pitt’s acquaintance towards the end of their time there, and the youths were mutually attracted by their brilliant conversational gifts and intellectual powers, which were to be sharpened by delightful intercourse at London and Wimbledon. In a passage penned in 1821, Wilberforce contrasts the comparative ill fortune of Pitt with the good fortune of his rival, Charles James Fox, who at Oxford made the acquaintance of a number of brilliant young men, Sheridan, Windham, Erskine, Hare, General Fitzpatrick, and Lord John Townshend. Nearly all of these, it is true, won distinction in public life; but it is scarcely fair to say that Pitt’s Cambridge friends (to whose number Wilberforce adds Lords Abercorn and Spencer) were deficient in parts. Their gifts, if less brilliant, were more solid than those of Fox and Sheridan. Lords Camden and Westmorland were to prove themselves able administrators, and the future Duke of Rutland, though showy and dissolute, displayed much ability as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Bankes “the precise” (as the Rolliad terms him) was a hard-hitter in debate; while the gentler qualities of Eliot endeared him both to Pitt and to his sister Harriet, whom he married in 1785.

Viewing the question more widely, we may surmise that Pitt’s career at Cambridge would have been more fruitful had he gone up somewhat later and mixed more with undergraduates, especially with good talkers. In that case we can imagine that the Grenville stiffness in him would almost have vanished. A bon vivant like Fox or North he could never have been; but the austerity of his life at Cambridge, save in its closing months, did not tend to cure him of the awkward shyness which Wilberforce noted as so prominent a trait in his character;67 and thus he went forth into the life of Westminster weighted with that serious defect, an incapacity for making a wide circle of friends or winning over enemies. In a sense it may be said that Pitt took political life too seriously. He prepared for it from boyhood so strenuously as partly to stunt his social faculties, and thereby handicap himself for life. For in that age the political arena was the close preserve of the nobles, gentry, and nabobs, with whom a statesman could scarcely succeed unless he had the manners of the clubs and the instincts of a sportsman. A compromise between Lord Chatham and Tony Lumpkin would have made the ideal leader. As it was, there entered on the scene a compromise between Chatham and Aristides.

Pitt’s chief relaxation from the “sober studies” at Pembroke Hall was found in visits to the great debates at Westminster. The first of these visits belongs to the month of January 1775, when his father was pleading passionately for conciliation with America. Benjamin Franklin, the champion of the colonists, was present; and the orator clearly aimed at persuading our kinsmen beyond the seas that they had the sympathy of very many British hearts. Those two orations echoed far and wide amid the dales of New England and the rocks of the Alleghanies. What, then, must have been the effect of the living voice and of that superb presence, which trebled the power of every word, on a sensitive youth whose being ever thrilled responsive to that of his father? Language failed him to express his feelings. “Nothing prevented his speech,” so he wrote to his mother, “from being the most forcible that can be imagined, and [the] Administration fully felt it. The manner and matter both were striking; far beyond what I can express. It was everything which was superior; ... his first speech lasted above an hour and the second half an hour—surely the two finest speeches that ever were made, unless by himself.”68 He heard also Chatham’s great effort of 30th May 1777, and describes it as marked by “a flow of eloquence and beauty of expression, animated and striking beyond expression.”

For Pitt, indeed, the chief delights of the vacations centred in St. Stephens. Never has there been a more eager listener to the debates; and here his method of studying the orators of Greece and Rome enabled him quickly to marshal the arguments of a speaker, assess them at their real worth, and fashion a retort. During one of his visits to the House of Lords he was introduced to Charles James Fox, already famous as the readiest debater in the Lower House. The Whig leader afterwards described the rapt attention with which the youth at his side listened to the speeches of the peers, and frequently turned to him with the remark: “But surely, Mr. Fox, that might be met thus,” or “Yes; but he lays himself open to this retort.” Little can Fox have imagined that these gifts, when whetted by maturity, were frequently to dash the hopes of the Whigs.69

The nice balancing of arguments, and the study of words, together with the art of voice production, may make a clever and persuasive speaker; but a great orator is he to whom such things are but trifling adornments, needful, indeed, for a complete equipment, but lost amidst the grander endowments of Nature, imagination and learning. Pitt excelled in the greater gifts no less than in the smaller graces. He had the advantage of a distinguished presence, a kindling eye, a sonorous voice; and to these excellences were added those of the mind, which outshone all adventitious aids. And these intellectual powers, which give weight to attack and cover a retreat, were cultivated with a wholeheartedness and persistence unparalleled in our annals. The pompous greetings of the Earl of Chatham to “the civilians and law of nations tribe” at Pembroke Hall show the thoroughness of his son’s application to law. It also seems probable that during the latter part of his stay at Cambridge he widened his outlook on public affairs by a study of Adam Smith’s great work, “The Wealth of Nations,” which appeared in 1776. He afterwards avowed himself a disciple of Adam Smith; and it is questionable whether he would have had time after leaving Cambridge thoroughly to master that work.

Books which bore upon the rise and fall of States seem to have engaged his attention, as was also the case with the young Napoleon—witness his copious notes on changes of dynasty and revolutions. In truth, those questions were then “in the air.” In 1748 Montesquieu had published his “Spirit of Laws”; Rousseau had brought out in 1762 his “Social Contract,” which Quinet has described as the seed of the French Revolution. Whether Pitt perused these works is doubtful; but it is clear that in his reading he had an eye for the causes that make or mar the fortunes of nations. Witness the remark in his letter of 19th March 1778, that nowhere in history could he find “any instance of a Nation so miserably sacrificed as this has been.”70 He shared the general conviction that none but Chatham could steer the ship of State into safe waters; and deep must have been his concern when the King refused to hear of Chatham forming a new Ministry for the purpose of conciliation. No consideration, not even the loss of his Crown (so he wrote to Lord North) would induce him to “stoop to the Opposition.”71

Such conduct bordered on the insane now that France had made common cause with the United States; but there was no means of forcing the King’s hand. The majority in Parliament supported his Minister, Lord North; and little could be expected from the Earl of Chatham in view of his growing infirmities of mind and body. His haughty and exacting ways no less than his inconsistencies of aim had scattered his following; and it was but a shadow of a name that appeared in the House of Lords on 7th April 1778. Encased in flannel, looking deadly pale, but with something of the old gleam in his eyes, he entered, staying his tottering frame on his sons, William and James. He spoke twice, urging the House not to debase the monarchy by conceding full independence to America, still less by giving way before France. “Shall this great kingdom now fall prostrate before the House of Bourbon? If we must fall, let us fall like men.” Much of the speech was inconsistent with his former opinions; but the peers recked not of inconsistency; they listened with bated breath to words which recalled the glorious days of 1759—words which were to be prophetic both for himself and for his son. A second oratorical effort was too much for his overwrought frame. He pressed his hand to his heart and fell. The peers hard by caught him in their arms; his sons hurried up and helped to bear him to a house in Downing Street. Thence he was removed to Hayes, and there on 11th May 1778, in the midst of his family, he passed away.

For the greatest statesman and orator of his age there could be but one place of sepulture. The House of Commons unanimously voted an address for a public funeral and a monument in Westminster; and probably of all Englishmen there was only one who regretted the decision. George III had revealed the pettiness of his nature when, in a letter to Lord North, he referred to Chatham’s breakdown in the House of Lords as his “political exit.” He now stated that, unless the inscription on the monument dwelt only on Chatham’s influence in “rouzing the nation at the beginning of the last war,” the compliment paid to the deceased statesman would be “rather an offensive measure” to him personally.72 “The Court do everything with an ill grace,” is William’s description of the preparations for the funeral.73 No one represented the King at the funeral on 9th June, a fact which gave to the ceremony the appearance of a great popular demonstration. It was the last of Chatham’s triumphs.

Owing to the absence of the eldest son with his regiment, William was the chief mourner. Few of the beholders had any knowledge of his manifold gifts; and the crowds which gazed at the stately procession, as at the burial of England’s glories and hopes, could not surmise that the slim figure following the hearse was destined to retrieve the disasters of the present and to link once more the name of Pitt with a great work of national revival.