William Pitt the Younger

• 1. Introduction

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  William Pitt the Younger became Britain's prime minister at the age of 24, the youngest person ever to hold that office in British or world history. He arrived at Downing Street in December 1783 to howls of mockery. The satirical publication The Rolliad ridiculed his youth, and the political establishment dismissed his government as a "mince-pie administration" that would not survive the Christmas season. It survived for seventeen years. How did a young man of barely twenty-four, with no natural taste for crowds and no romantic life to speak of, come to hold a nation together through revolution, mutiny, and the rise of Napoleon? What drove him to fight duels on Putney Heath, engineer the union of Britain and Ireland, and introduce the first income tax in British history? And why does his biographer William Hague conclude that the slave trade, which Pitt had every opportunity to end, stands as his greatest failure?

• 2. The Making of a Prodigy

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  Hayes Place in the village of Hayes, Kent, was where William Pitt was born on the 28th of May 1759. His father was William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, himself a former prime minister. His mother, Hester Grenville, was the sister of another former prime minister, George Grenville. The biographer John Ehrman observed that Pitt combined the brilliance and dynamism of his father's line with the determined, methodical character of the Grenvilles.

  Poor health kept the young Pitt at home, where he was taught by the Reverend Edward Wilson. He was admitted to Pembroke College, Cambridge, on the 26th of April 1773, a month before his fourteenth birthday. His tutor there was George Pretyman Tomline, also of Pembroke, who became a lifelong friend and confidant; Pitt later appointed him Bishop of Lincoln, then Winchester. At Cambridge, Pitt also befriended William Wilberforce, beginning an alliance that would shape the politics of the next generation.

  Wilberforce described Pitt's gift for wordplay with precision: "no man ever indulged more freely or happily in that playful facetiousness which gratifies all without wounding any." Yet Pitt rarely left the university grounds and socialised only with those already known to him. In 1776, plagued by poor health, he graduated without sitting examinations, taking advantage of a privilege reserved for sons of noblemen. His father, by then the Earl of Chatham, died in 1778. As the younger son, Pitt received only a small inheritance, and he was forced almost immediately to defend his late father's reputation against claims by the Bute family that the Earl had sought a political coalition. Though just over nineteen years old, Pitt argued publicly against the claim and the Bute family withdrew it. He then read law at Lincoln's Inn and was called to the bar in the summer of 1780.

• 3. A Seat and a Voice

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  At twenty-one, Pitt contested the University of Cambridge seat in the general elections of September 1780. He came last among the five candidates. He had campaigned on his own terms, without backers or party affiliation, telling a friend that he refused to be thought part of any group and called himself nothing but "the Independent Whig."

  Patronage was the reality of the age, however, and Pitt secured the support of James Lowther, later 1st Earl Lowther, through his university friend Charles Manners, 4th Duke of Rutland. Lowther controlled the pocket borough of Appleby, and a by-election there sent Pitt to the House of Commons in January 1781. The irony was not lost on him or on history: the man who would later rail against rotten boroughs had entered Parliament through one.

  His maiden speech transformed the chamber. Sir John Sinclair, the member for Lostwithiel, wrote that Pitt's first speech was "rarely equalled by any ever delivered in that assembly." When Pitt sat down, the applause was thunderous. Sinclair noted "utter astonishment by an audience accustomed to the most splendid efforts of eloquence."

  Pitt aligned himself initially with prominent Whigs, including Charles James Fox, denouncing the continuation of the American War of Independence. When the Rockingham ministry collapsed and Lord Shelburne took power, Pitt joined as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Fox refused to serve under Shelburne and instead formed a coalition with Lord North. King George III, who despised Fox, offered the premiership to Pitt when Shelburne resigned in 1783. Pitt declined, calculating he could not hold the Commons. When the Fox-North coalition fell in December 1783, the king offered the position a third time, and Pitt finally accepted.

• 4. Governing a Kingdom

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  Pitt's first major legislation as prime minister was the India Act 1784, which reorganised the British East India Company. It created a new Board of Control, appointed by the King, and centralised authority in India by reducing the power of the governors of Bombay and Madras while strengthening Governor-General Charles Cornwallis. Pitt himself was appointed alongside Lord Sydney as president.

  The national debt had doubled to £243 million during the American war, with a third of the annual budget of £24 million consumed by interest payments alone. Pitt's response was careful and systematic. In 1786 he instituted a sinking fund of £1 million per year, designed to accumulate interest and eventually retire the debt. By 1792 the debt had fallen to £170 million. He had learned the idea from his father as far back as 1772, when Earl Chatham had been informed of it by the Welsh thinker Sir Richard Price.

  One in five of Britain's imports entered the country smuggled. Pitt cut tariffs on easily evaded goods, including tea, wine, spirits, and tobacco, raising customs revenues by nearly £2 million a year by making honest trading cheaper than the black market. In 1797, when France's war was threatening Britain's gold reserves, Pitt suspended the convertibility of banknotes to gold. The paper currency that resulted lasted more than two decades. He then introduced Great Britain's first-ever income tax. France's Minister of Finance later called both measures "genius" for preventing France from destroying Britain's economy.

  Australia entered the picture through a logistical crisis. Convicts had been transported to the Thirteen Colonies; after American independence, that route was closed. In August 1786 Pitt's government decided to establish a penal colony on the other side of the world. The First Fleet of eleven vessels carried over a thousand settlers, including 778 convicts. The Colony of New South Wales was formally proclaimed by Governor Arthur Phillip on the 7th of February 1788 at Sydney, and Pittwater was named that same year by Phillip himself.

• 5. War, Repression, and Saint-Domingue

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  France's declaration of war forced Pitt's hand. He had wanted to stay out of the conflict for economic reasons, but King George III gave him an ultimatum: resign or go to war. Committed to financial stability, Pitt agreed reluctantly. The consequences reshaped Britain for a generation.

  At home, the war was cast as an ideological struggle. The government funded a propaganda campaign contrasting ordered British society against French "anarchy," subsidising writers from secret service funds. The historian Eric J. Evans counted around 200 prosecutions of suspected radicals in the 1790s, far fewer than the prosecutions of suspected Jacobites after the rebellions of 1715 and 1745. Still, habeas corpus was suspended in 1794, the Seditious Meetings Act 1795 restricted public assembly, and the Combination Acts curbed political organisations. Jane Austen, writing Northanger Abbey in the 1790s, had a character remark that no family could keep secrets when government spies were everywhere.

  The most costly miscalculation was Saint-Domingue. In 1793, aiming to capture the French colony as a bargaining chip, British troops landed at Jérémie on the 20th of September. Two days later, Commodore John Ford took Môle-Saint-Nicolas without a fight. But the French Republic had abolished slavery in the colony, and most of Saint-Domingue's Black population rallied to the Republican cause. Yellow fever devastated the British forces. In 1795, undeterred, Pitt launched what he called the "great push," sending 218 ships from Portsmouth in November. The historian Michael Duffy noted that Pitt committed more manpower and money to the Caribbean than to Europe in the years 1793-1798, making the West Indies Britain's primary theatre of war. By 1795, half the British Army was in the West Indies. Colonel Thomas Maitland eventually negotiated a withdrawal with Governor-General Toussaint Louverture, and the last British troops left on the 31st of August 1798. The campaign killed roughly 50,000 soldiers and sailors, with another 50,000 rendered unfit for service. The military historian Sir John Fortescue wrote that Pitt's cabinet had tried to destroy French power in "these pestilent islands only to discover, when it was too late, that they practically destroyed the British army."

• 6. Ireland and the Act of Union

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  In May 1798, the United Irishmen launched a rebellion to win independence for Ireland. The Crown executed about 1,500 United Irishmen after the revolt was crushed. Pitt's reading of the uprising was strategic: the Dublin parliament, dominated by Protestant Ascendancy families, had proved ungovernable, and French expeditions to Ireland in 1796 and 1798 had nearly established a French base on Britain's flank.

  The sectarian situation in rural Ireland had been deteriorating since at least 1793, when a conflict between Catholic "Defenders" and Protestant "Peep o' Day Boys" had turned into open warfare. In September 1795 a section of the Peep o' Day Boys renamed themselves the Loyal Orange Order, committed to Protestant supremacy at almost any cost. In December 1796 a French invasion led by General Lazare Hoche was stopped only by bad weather.

  Pitt's solution was union. Because the Dublin parliament did not want to dissolve itself, he used what would now be called pork barrel politics, bribing Irish MPs to vote for the Acts of Union 1800. His intent was to pair union with Catholic emancipation, since Catholics formed a 75% majority of Ireland's population. George III refused, arguing that emancipation would violate his coronation oath. Pitt resigned on the 16th of February 1801. The reason he gave publicly was Catholic emancipation, but his biographer's later research suggests the real cause was his desire to make peace with France, which he could not achieve against opposition from the King and senior Cabinet members. The resignation was engineered so carefully that its actual rationale went unchallenged for over 200 years.

• 7. The Final Years

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  Pitt returned to office on the 10th of May 1804, forming a second ministry far weaker than his first. George III refused to allow Fox into the government, and many of Pitt's former allies had drifted into opposition. In October 1805 Admiral Horatio Nelson won the Battle of Trafalgar, securing British naval supremacy. At the Lord Mayor's Banquet, toasted as "the Saviour of Europe," Pitt replied with what became his most famous speech: "England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example."

  The Coalition still collapsed. Defeats at the Battle of Ulm in October 1805 and the Battle of Austerlitz in December 1805 left Britain facing France alone. Hearing of Austerlitz, Pitt pointed to a map of Europe and said, "Roll up that map; it will not be wanted these ten years."

  The setbacks accelerated his physical decline. Pitt had suffered poor health since childhood, plagued by gout and what contemporaries called "biliousness." His fondness for port wine had begun when a physician prescribed it for his chronic illness. On the 23rd of January 1806, he died at Bowling Green House on Putney Heath, probably from peptic ulceration. He was unmarried and left no children. His debts stood at £40,000; Parliament voted to pay them. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on the 22nd of February, having lain in state for two days in the Palace of Westminster. He was succeeded as prime minister by his first cousin William Grenville, 1st Baron Grenville, whose coalition government included the lifelong political rival Charles James Fox.

• 8. Character and Legacy

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  The historian Asa Briggs wrote that Pitt's personality did not endear itself to the British mind; he was too solitary, too colourless, too inclined to exude superiority. Lord Minto called him "the Atlas of our reeling globe." William Wilberforce offered a different verdict: "For personal purity, disinterestedness and love of this country, I have never known his equal."

  Pitt served as prime minister for eighteen years and 343 days, the second-longest tenure in British history, behind only Robert Walpole. Throughout that time he also held the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. He called himself an "independent Whig" but historians have long labelled him the founder of the "new Toryism," a political identity that kept the Tory Party in power for roughly a quarter of a century after his death.

  The historian Charles Petrie placed him among the greatest prime ministers "if on no other ground than that he enabled the country to pass from the old order to the new without any violent upheaval." His biographer William Hague identified the failure to abolish the slave trade as Pitt's greatest shortcoming, noting that by the end of his career conditions for a successful abolition bill existed, but that Pitt was by then a "spent force." The Slave Trade Act passed in 1807, the year after his death. Hague wrote that Pitt's long premiership "tested the natural limits of how long it is possible to be at the top. From 1783 to 1792, he faced each fresh challenge with brilliance; from 1793 he showed determination but sometimes faltered; and from 1804 he was worn down."

  Pitt broke off a potential marriage to Eleanor Eden in 1797, writing to her father, Lord Auckland, that he found "the obstacles to it decisive and insurmountable." Hague concluded that Pitt was likely asexual, prioritising his political ambitions above all personal attachments. It is perhaps fitting that a man who sacrificed nearly everything for office should be remembered in stone, street names, and water: Pittwater in New South Wales, Pitt Street in Sydney, and a mountain on Norfolk Island all carry his name, placed there during his own lifetime.