However much Pitt enjoyed Steele’s company on occasions like these, he did not allow his feelings to influence him when a question of promotion arose. Steele’s talents being only moderate, his rise was slow, but he finally became one of the Paymasters of the Forces. In that station his conduct was not wholly satisfactory; and Pitt’s friendship towards him cooled, though it was renewed not long before the Prime Minister’s death.

For George Rose, on the other hand, despite his lack of joviality, Pitt cherished an ever deepening regard proportioned to the thoroughness and tactfulness of his services at the Treasury. In view of the vast number of applications for places and pensions, of which, moreover, Burke’s Economy Bill had lessened the supply, the need of firm control at the Treasury is obvious; and Pitt and the country owed much to the man who for sixteen years held the purse-strings tight.393 On his part Rose felt unwavering enthusiasm for his chief from the time of their first interview in Paris in 1783 until the dark days that followed Austerlitz. Only on two subjects did he refuse to follow Pitt, namely, on Parliamentary Reform, from which he augured “the most direful consequences,” and the Slavery Question. That he ventured twice to differ decidedly from Pitt (in spite of earnest private appeals) proves his independence of mind as well as the narrowness of his outlook. He even offered to resign his post at the Treasury owing to their difference on Reform, but Pitt negatived this proposal. We need not accept his complacent statement that Pitt later on came over decidedly to his opinion on that topic.394

The tastes of the two friends were very similar, especially in their love of the country; and it was in the same month (September 1785) that each bought a small estate. We find Pitt writing at that time to Wilberforce respecting his purchase of “Holwood Hill,” near Bromley, Kent, and stating that Rose had just bought an estate in the New Forest, which he vowed was “just breakfasting distance from town.” “We are all turning country gentlemen very fast,” added the statesman. A harassing session like that of 1785 is certain to set up a centrifugal tendency; and we may be sure that the nearness of Holwood to Hayes was a further attraction. Not that Pitt was as yet fond of agriculture. He had neither the time nor the money to spare for the high farming which was then yearly adding to the wealth of the nation. But he inherited Chatham’s love of arranging an estate, and he was now to find the delight of laying out grounds, planting trees and shrubs and watching their growth. Holwood had many charms—“a most beautiful spot, wanting nothing but a house fit to live in”—so he described it to Wilberforce.395 He moved into his new abode on 5th November 1785, and during the rest of the vacation spent most of his time there, residing at Downing Street only on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Many affairs of State were decided at parties at Holwood, or, later on, at Dundas’s villa at Wimbledon.

Pitt admitted to Wilberforce that the purchase of Holwood was a piece of folly; and this was soon apparent to all Pitt’s friends who had old-fashioned notions of making both ends meet. That desirable result had rarely, if ever, been attained by the son of the magnificent Chatham. Sparing for the nation’s exchequer, Pitt was prodigal of his own. The aristocratic hauteur, of which all but his friends complained, led him to disregard the peccadilloes of servants and the overcharges of tradesmen. A bachelor Prime Minister, whose nose is high in air, is good sport for parasites; and even before the purchase of Holwood, Pitt was in difficulties. During one of the visits to Brighthelmstone, “Bob” Smith undertook to overhaul his affairs, and found old and forgotten bills amounting to £7,914. The discovery came as a shock; for Pitt, with his usual hopefulness, had told his Mentor that, as three-quarters of his official salary were due, he would have enough for his current liabilities. A further scrutiny showed that tradesmen, in default of any present return, took care to ensure an abundant harvest in the future. The butcher usually sent, or charged for, three or four hundredweight of meat on a Saturday, probably because Pitt was often away for the week-end. The meat bill for January 1785, when Pitt generally dined out, was £96, which, reckoning the price at sixpence a pound, implied a delivery of 34 hundredweight. Other bills for provisions (wrote Smith to Wilberforce) “exceed anything I could have imagined.” Apparently they rose in proportion to Pitt’s absence from home. His accounts were kept by a man named Wood, whose book-keeping seems to have been correct; but Smith begged Wilberforce to urge on Pitt the need of an immediate reform of his household affairs.396 Whether it took place, we cannot tell; for this is one of the private subjects over which Bishop Tomline chose to draw the veil of propriety.

An economical householder would have found relief from the addition of £3,000 a year to his income. That was the net sum which accrued to him after August 1792, from the Lord Wardenship of the Cinque Ports.397 That Pitt felt more easy in his mind is clear from his letter to Lady Chatham, dated Downing Street, 11th November 1793. She had been in temporary embarrassment. He therefore sent £300, and gently chid her for concealing her need so long. He continued as follows: “My accession of income has hitherto found so much employment in the discharge of former arrears as to leave no very large fund which I can with propriety dispose of. This, however, will mend every day, and at all events I trust you will never scruple to tell me when you have the slightest occasion for any aid that I can supply.”398

Unfortunately, Pitt soon fell into difficulties, and partly from his own generosity as Colonel of the Walmer Volunteers. As we shall also see, he gave £2,000 to the Patriotic Fund started in January 1798. But carelessness continued to be his chief curse. In truth his lordly nature and his early training in the household of Chatham unfitted him for the practice of that bourgeois virtue, frugality. That he sought to practise it for the Commonwealth is a signal proof of his patriotism. We shall see that his embarrassments probably hindered him from a marriage, which might have crowned with joy his somewhat solitary life.

In the career of Pitt we find few incidents of the lighter kind, which diversify the lives of most statesmen of that age. Two such, however, connect him with the jovial society of Dundas. It was their custom to outline over their cups the course of the forthcoming debates; and on one occasion, when a motion was to be brought forward by Mr. (afterwards Earl) Grey, Dundas amused the company by making a burlesque oration on the Whig side. Pitt was so charmed by the performance that he declared that Dundas must make the official reply. The joke sounded well over wine; but great was the Scotsman’s astonishment to find himself saddled with the task in the House. Members were equally taken aback; and the lobbies soon rustled with eager conjectures as to the reason why Pitt had surrendered his dearly cherished prerogative. It then transpired that the Prime Minister had acted partly on a whim, and partly on the conviction that a speaker who had so cleverly pleaded a case must be able to answer it with equal effect.399

The other incident is likewise Bacchic, and is also uncertain as to date. Pitt, Dundas, and Thurlow had been dining with Jenkinson at Croydon; and during their rollicking career back towards Wimbledon, they found a toll-bar gate between Streatham and Tooting carelessly left open. Wine, darkness, and the frolicsome spirit of youth prompted them to ride through and cheat the keeper. He ran out, called to them in vain, and, taking them for highwaymen, fired his blunderbuss at their retreating forms.400 The discharge was of course as harmless as that of firearms usually was except at point-blank range; but the writers of the “Rolliad” got wind of the affair, and satirised Pitt’s lawlessness in the following lines:

Gaiety and grief often tread close on one another’s heels; and Pitt had his full share of the latter. The sudden death of his sister Harriet, on 25th September 1786, was a severe blow. She had married his Cambridge friend, Eliot, and expired shortly after childbirth. She was his favourite sister, having entered closely and fondly into his early life. He was prostrated with grief, and for some time could not attend even to the public business which was his second nature. Eliot, now destined to be more than ever a friend and brother, came to his house and for some time lived with him. It will be of interest to print here a new letter of George III to a Mr. Frazer who had informed him of the sad event.

The King further evinced his tactful sympathy by suggesting that Pitt should for a time visit his mother at Burton Pynsent. In other respects his private life was uneventfully happy. The conclusion of the commercial treaty with France, the buoyancy of the national revenue, and the satisfactory issue of the Dutch troubles must have eased his anxieties in the years 1786–87; and after the serious crisis last named, his position was truly enviable, until the acute situation arising from the mental malady of George III overclouded his prospects at the close of the year 1788.

Certainly Pitt was little troubled by his constituents. Almost the only proof of his parliamentary connection with the University of Cambridge (apart from warnings from friends at election times how so and so is to “be got at”) is in a letter which I have discovered in the Hardwicke Papers. It refers to a Cambridge Debt Bill about to be introduced by Charles Yorke in April 1787, to which the University had requested Pitt to move certain amendments in its interest. It will be seen that Pitt proposed to treat the request rather lightly:

In the whole of Pitt’s correspondence I have found only one episode which lights up the recesses of his mind. As a rule, his letters are disappointingly business-like and formal. He wrote as a Prime Minister to supporters, rarely as a friend to a friend. And those who search the hundreds of packets of the Pitt Papers in order to find the real man will be tempted to liken him to that elusive creature which, when pursued, shoots away among the rocks under a protective cloud of ink. At one point, however, we catch a glimpse of his inmost beliefs. Wilberforce, having come under deep religious convictions in the autumn of 1785, resolved to retire for a time from all kinds of activity in order to take his bearings anew. Then he wrote to Pitt a full description of his changed views of life, stating also his conviction that he must give up some forms of work and amusement, and that he could never be so much of a party man as he had hitherto been. Pitt’s reply, of 2nd December 1785, has recently seen the light. After stating that any essential opposition between them would cause him grief but must leave his affection quite untouched, he continued as follows:

On the morrow, a Saturday, he called on Wilberforce at Wimbledon, and the friends for two hours unburdened their hearts to one another. We know little of that moving converse. The two men had ideals so different that unison was out of the question. The statesman, so we learn, had never reflected much on religion, that is, in the keenly introspective sense in which Wilberforce now used the word. To Pitt, as to most Englishmen, religion meant the acceptance of certain doctrines laid down by the State Church, and we may describe it as largely political and conventional, buttressing the existing order, but by no means transforming life or character. One glance alone we gain into the sanctuary of his thoughts; he told Wilberforce that Bishop Butler’s “Analogy” raised in his mind more doubts than it answered—a proof (perhaps the only proof that survives) of his cherishing under that correct exterior a critical and questioning spirit.

To Wilberforce, thenceforth, all doubts were visitations of the devil. Indeed, the microscopic watch which he kept on his thoughts and moods seemed likely to stunt his activities. From this he was perhaps saved by his friendship with Pitt. True, they could no longer tread the same path. Pitt obeyed that call to action on behalf of his country which from his boyhood had deadened all other sounds. Wilberforce for a long time held aloof from politics as debateable ground beset with snares to the soul. And yet, though the two men diverged, the promptings of affection kept them ever within hail. No gulf ever opened out such as Coleridge finely pictured as yawning between two parted friends:

Indeed, Wilberforce found with some surprise that on most questions they agreed as before404—a proof that there was no desertion of principle on Pitt’s part after the session of 1785. We may go further, and assert that in their changed relations the two friends exerted upon each other a mutually beneficent influence. The new convictions of Wilberforce tended to refine the activities of his friend; and Pitt’s practical good sense helped to launch the philanthropist on that career of usefulness in which he could both glorify God and uplift myriads of negroes.

A sharp difference of opinion respecting the war with France overclouded their lives in the year 1793. Wilberforce fully recognized the sincerity of the Cabinet’s efforts to avoid a rupture, and admitted that Ministers had not pursued a “war system.” But shortly before the outbreak of hostilities, when he was about to speak in favour of conciliation, Pitt took the strange step of sending Bankes to him, earnestly begging him not to speak, as it might do irreparable mischief, and promising him an opportunity for the statement of his views. That opportunity did not come; and Wilberforce evidently resented this attempt to make political capital out of their friendship.405 The breach between them did not widen until late in the year 1794, when Wilberforce deemed it his duty to move an amendment in favour of peace. Bankes and Duncombe supported it; but it was easily defeated. In the following year the relations between Pitt and Wilberforce on this question became so strained as to cause both of them deep distress. Indeed Pitt, who generally enjoyed profound slumbers, for a time suffered from insomnia. The only other occasions when sleep fled from him were the sudden resignation of Earl Temple late in 1783, the mutiny at the Nore, and the arrival of the news of Trafalgar.

The old feelings began to reassert themselves, when Pitt spoke strongly in favour of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (26th February 1795); but the friends did not meet for nearly a month, and then with some little embarrassment on both sides. All shadows, however, vanished in a few months’ time, when Wilberforce came to see that his friend longed for peace so soon as it was compatible with security. Thereafter their old friendship revived, though tinged with the sadness attending disappointed hopes.

Pitt did not so readily forget the independence now and again displayed by Bankes, for instance, in opposing Parliamentary Reform, the Westminster Scrutiny, and the continuance of the war. Though they were friendly at Cambridge, and afterwards at Goostree’s Club and in the House, Pitt never warmed to Bankes, whose nature indeed was too precise, cold, and prudent ever to call forth affection. Respected by all for his sound but stolid speeches, he for forty years sat at Westminster as member for Corfe Castle. No one seems ever to have thought of making Bankes either a Minister or a peer. At a later time the circle of Pitt’s friends included Canning and Wellesley, who will receive notice in later chapters.

On the whole, Pitt seems to have been somewhat exacting in his friendships. One of his early comrades complained that all suggestions to the Prime Minister must, under pain of his resentment, go forth to the world as emanations of his wisdom. This is to sacrifice friendliness and candour to egotism and parliamentary punctilio. True, no statesman can afford to neglect prudential considerations; and we may freely grant that the cautious calculations of Pitt rarely obsessed his whole being, as that of Napoleon was dominated by his egotism. We do not find Pitt acting, still less speaking, in the sense which prompted the remark of Napoleon about an over scrupulous servant: “He is not devoted to me; he does not want to get on.”

It must be confessed that there is something wanting about Pitt. He lacked geniality and glow alike in his treatment of men, and in his attitude towards the aspirations of the age then dawning. Probably this defect sprang from a physical basis. It must be remembered that Chatham was nearly all his life a martyr to gout. He bequeathed this weakness to his second son, a fact which may account for the coldness of Pitt’s nature. Just as creatures with a torpid circulation love to bask in the sun, so his chilliness may have prompted the cravings for the Bacchic society of Dundas and Steele. In this respect he suffers by comparison with Fox, the full-blooded man, the impetuous foe, the open-handed, forgiving friend, whose character somewhat resembles that of Antony, deified by Cleopatra: