William Pitt the Younger

English prime minister (1783-1801)

• Born: May 28, 1759
• Birthplace: Hayes, Kent, England
• Died: January 23, 1806
• Place of death: Putney Heath, London, England

One of the longest-serving prime ministers in British history, Pitt did much to restore stability to British politics in the aftermath of the American Revolution. He also strengthened the office of prime minister, led the international opposition to revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and changed the constitutional relationship between Great Britain and Ireland.

Early Life

William Pitt the Younger grew up in an intensely political environment. His father, William Pitt the Elder (created earl of Chatham in 1766), was one of the preeminent politicians of the mid-eighteenth century and, in 1759, was at the peak of his career thanks to his association with Great Britain’s greatest victories in the Seven Years’ War. Pitt the Younger’s mother, Lady Hester Grenville, was the sister of the Second Earl Temple and George Grenville, both important politicians themselves. Pitt the Elder fostered his son’s interest in politics, and this became the younger Pitt’s preoccupation.

Suffering from frail health, he was tutored at home before going to Cambridge University at the early age of fourteen. A younger son, Pitt trained for a legal career, but he retained a keen interest in politics and was present in the House of Lords in April, 1778, when his father collapsed in the course of his final speech. Pitt announced his intention of seeking election to Parliament before he attained the minimum age of twenty-one. He stood unsuccessfully for Cambridge University in 1780 but was elected early the following year for Sir James Lowther’s pocket borough of Appleby.

Pitt thus entered the House of Commons at twenty-one and soon attracted favorable attention with his measured criticisms of the American policy of Lord North’s administration, his advocacy of reform, and his calm and self-assured manner. After North was driven from office in 1782, Pitt was offered a junior position in the administration formed by the marquess of Rockingham. Pitt respectfully declined, letting it be known that he would have a major office or none at all. When Rockingham died in July, 1782, the second earl of Shelburne was asked to form a new government. The new prime minister had been a close ally of Pitt’s father, and the young man accepted the position of first lord of the Admiralty.

Tall and lanky, Pitt had a thin, pointed nose that delighted caricaturists. Although he had a small circle of close friends, he was reserved in manner and was more often the object of admiration than affection. He was a lifelong bachelor with few interests outside politics or affairs of state.

Life’s Work

Pitt rose to prominence during the greatest crisis in late eighteenth century British politics. The ministry to which he belonged faced the difficult task of negotiating a peace settlement to the American Revolutionary War. When finally negotiated, the draft treaty faced strong opposition from the unlikely combination of Lord North, who had been prime minister during most of the war, and Charles James Fox, who had been one of North’s greatest critics and who now led most of Rockingham’s former followers. Though many were shocked by such an unholy alliance, Fox and North between them controlled a majority of the House of Commons. In February, 1782, they defeated the treaty. Shelburne’s government resigned, and George III was forced to call in Fox and North.

The king hated the Fox-North coalition, as the new ministry was known, but was forced to tolerate it. He played a waiting game, giving the coalition minimal support and looking for an opportunity to rid himself of it. His chance came in late 1783, when the coalition introduced its India Act. The controversial measure passed the Commons with a comfortable majority. When it reached the lords, George III permitted Pitt’s cousin, Third Earl Temple, to say that the king would regard any lord supporting the bill as a personal enemy. The upper house threw out the bill, and the king dismissed the coalition. It was a move of questionable constitutionality and one that the king would not have chanced without the prospect of an alternative administration. This he had, thanks to Pitt, who had secretly agreed to participate in the formation of a new ministry.

Named first lord of the treasury, Pitt was, in effect, prime minister at the tender age of twenty-four, the youngest in British history. He faced a hostile House of Commons controlled by his enemies. Nevertheless, with the king’s support, he stood his ground, and, though suffering defeat after defeat in early 1784, he refused to resign. Eventually, he secured the minimum of legislation necessary to keep government going, and, in March, 1784, the king, at Pitt’s request, called new elections. Pitt and his supporters won handily. While no eighteenth century government ever lost a general election, the degree of Pitt’s victory was increased by a public opinion still offended at the union of Fox and North.

After the election of 1784, Pitt was secure in Parliament. During the next nine years, he did much to restore stability to British politics and enjoyed considerable legislative success in the process. The first major statesman to acknowledge the ideas of Adam Smith, Pitt gained a reputation as a master of government finance. He continued the reorganization of the treasury, overhauled the existing system of customs and excise taxes, established a “sinking fund” for the gradual reduction of the national debt (which had grown enormously as a result of the war with America), and had a commercial treaty negotiated with France.

Like his father, Pitt was a convinced imperialist, and his administration oversaw a number of important developments overseas that showed that the loss of the American colonies did not mean the end of the British Empire. In 1785, Pitt secured his own East India Act, which gave the British government much more control over the political activities of the British East India Company. Great Britain also became more active in the Pacific. Trade was expanded with China, and the settlement of Australia (as a penal colony) began. In North America, the old colony of Quebec was reorganized by the Canada (or Constitutional) Act of 1791. This established separate colonies of Upper and Lower Canada, each with an elected assembly as part of its government.

Pitt, however, was not always successful, especially as a reformer. In 1785, he introduced a bill calling for a modest measure of parliamentary reform. The Commons defeated it, 248 to 171. Other initiatives for freer trade with Ireland and for an end to the slave trade also failed. Pitt took the reverses in stride. His calm outward appearance was little ruffled by such personal disappointments.

By the late 1780’s, Pitt was the dominant personality in British politics. His position, like that of all successful eighteenth century prime ministers, was based on the simultaneous support of the king and Parliament. The former owed much to Pitt’s rescue of George III from the despised coalition, and the king made available to Pitt all the personal support and powers of patronage that he had denied to the coalition. Fox’s best hope of returning to power became the possibility that the king would die. This seemed a distinct possibility in 1788, when the king became dangerously ill. Pitt remained calm, outmaneuvered Fox yet again, and came through the Regency Crisis, as this political episode became known, unscathed. Pitt’s sway over Parliament was based on his dominant position in the House of Commons. This dominance was based not on a party but on a combination of Pitt’s personal followers, a sizable group of officeholders, and a large number of independent members who had confidence in Pitt’s abilities.

Pitt’s success at home was matched by an effective foreign policy, as he often took the dominant role in foreign affairs. His administration did much to restore British prestige in the aftermath of the American war. His greatest diplomatic triumph came, perhaps, in the Nootka Sound crisis, when Spain was forced to recognize a British presence on the northwest coast of North America. In the early 1790’s, however, the French Revolution began to change the political landscape. Like most of his contemporaries, Pitt was slow to appreciate the significance of the French Revolution, and he initially welcomed it as something that promised to weaken Great Britain’s traditional enemy. It was only after the revolution began to display aggressive tendencies and disturb the balance of power in Europe that Pitt became alarmed. Events flowing from the French Revolution dominated the rest of Pitt’s political career.

In February, 1793, France declared war, adding Great Britain to its list of external enemies. By this time the revolution was entering its most radical phase, thoroughly frightening supporters of the established order throughout Europe. Pitt devoted himself to the war effort, but he proved to be less successful in war than he had been in peace. His task was similar to his father’s in the Seven Years’ War, and Pitt adopted a maritime, peripheral strategy with alliances that was roughly similar. Though there were naval victories and successes overseas (some of which expanded the empire), the French were increasingly victorious on the Continent and shattered the first two coalitions that Pitt helped to organize against them. By the end of the century, Great Britain was largely fighting alone against an expanding France led by Napoleon Bonaparte.

At home, the war was having a powerful impact on Pitt, the government, and the people. The financial demands imposed by the war threatened Pitt’s earlier reforms and resulted in the introduction of the first income tax in modern British history. The war took on the trappings of a counterrevolutionary crusade to many and short-circuited any hopes that the 1790’s would be an age of reform. Instead, with Pitt’s participation, it became one of the most repressive periods in British history as the middle and upper classes increasingly viewed reformist activities as revolutionary agitation. The right of habeas corpus was suspended (from 1794 to 1801), while other measures effectively cracked down on political dissent by restricting the freedom of the press, broadening the definition of treason, limiting political meetings, and outlawing unions of workers.

The wars against France also caused Pitt to play a major role in altering the relationship of Ireland to Great Britain. Ireland erupted in rebellion in 1798; though order was eventually restored, all of the old fears about Ireland as a backdoor through which the French might pass were revived. Pitt was not alone in concluding that a semi-independent Ireland was a luxury that Great Britain could not afford. His solution was a union with Ireland along the lines of the Union of 1707 between England and Scotland. It required all of Pitt’s political ability, as well as some outright bribery, to persuade the Irish parliament to vote itself out of existence. The union went into effect in 1801, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and establishing the constitutional framework within which later controversies over Ireland’s status would develop.

Pitt had hoped to make the union palatable to the Catholic majority in Ireland by following it with a general measure of Catholic emancipation (removing the remaining political and civil restrictions on Catholics), and advocates of the union had made liberal use of his sentiments. Pitt, however, was unable to deliver Catholic emancipation. The obstacle was George III, who believed that to sanction such a policy would be to violate his coronation oath. Faced with such royal intransigence—and a war that was not going well—Pitt resigned. He was succeeded as prime minister by Henry Addington. Pitt refused to go into opposition, though some of his followers did. Addington did succeed in obtaining the Treaty of Amiens, which lasted about fourteen months. With the return of war in 1803, however, there was a growing demand for Pitt’s recall. In 1804, he returned to the prime ministership, making a promise in deference to the king’s health that he would not raise the question of Catholic emancipation.

Pitt’s second ministry was short, unhappy, and dominated by the struggle with Napoleon. Great Britain established its dominance at sea, but French victories on land destroyed Pitt’s Third Coalition. Great Britain continued to fight, but Pitt would not live to see the end of the fight. The man whom Napoleon now regarded as the most implacable of his foes died on January 23, 1806. The war continued for almost another decade.

Significance

William Pitt the Younger was the dominant political figure of the last quarter of the eighteenth century. He was integral to the restoration of political stability after the political chaos that accompanied the end of the American Revolution, and British politics was largely realigned into supporters of Pitt and his opponents, the Foxite Whigs. Pitt’s first ministry was a tenure of power surpassed in length only by that of Robert Walpole. The son and nephew of prime ministers, Pitt had an important impact on the office. He did much to institutionalize the position of prime minister and demonstrated, when he ousted Lord Chancellor Edward Thurlow in 1792, that the prime minister could control the composition of the cabinet. (The major attribute of a modern prime minister that Pitt lacked was that of resting his claim to the office on the support of a party controlling the House of Commons.)

Pitt also left an imprint on his country through his administrative and financial reforms, his influence on the empire, and his refusal to admit French dominance in Europe. Other aspects of Pitt’s legacy are more debatable. The repression of the 1790’s provided a precedent for the even more repressive period after 1815. Also questionable was Pitt’s Irish policy: Not only did it raise, in Catholic emancipation, an issue that would bedevil the next generation of British politicians, but also the creation of the United Kingdom provided the context within which the contentious Irish Question of the nineteenth century would arise.

Bibliography

Bolton, G. C. The Passing of the Irish Act of Union: A Study in Parliamentary Politics. London: Oxford University Press, 1966. Best and fullest account of the creation of the United Kingdom. Deals with the act’s origins and consequences, as well as its passage. Useful for putting Pitt’s role into context.

Cannon, John. The Fox-North Coalition: Crisis of the Constitution, 1782-1784. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1969. The best account of the circumstances that surrounded Pitt’s rise to power, written from a neo-Whiggish point of view. Cannon shows that Pitt was more actively involved in the intrigues that led to the coalition’s fall than was previously thought.

Derry, John W. Politics in the Age of Fox, Pitt, and Liverpool: Continuity and Transformation. 1990. Rev. ed. New York: Palgrave, 2001. This examination of late eighteenth century British politics describes how the government was resilient enough to withstand the disruptions of war, the French Revolution, and dramatic social and economic changes.

Ehrman, John. The Younger Pitt: The Years of Acclaim. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969. Takes Pitt’s career through the Regency Crisis, giving due attention to Pitt’s political success during the 1780’s.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Younger Pitt: The Reluctant Transition. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983. This sequel to the above volume covers Pitt’s life and times from 1789 through 1796. The emphasis is on Pitt’s transition to war minister and opponent of the French Revolution. The product of immense research.

Jarrett, Derek. Pitt the Younger. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974. Brief, well-illustrated volume in the British Prime Ministers series. A good introduction to Pitt and the major issues of his political career.

Mackesy, Piers. War Without Victory: The Downfall of Pitt, 1799-1802. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1984. Study, by an eminent military historian, of one of the least successful phases of the war with France. Concentrates on war policy at the highest levels and sees Pitt’s frustration with the war (and his cabinet colleagues’ disagreements over it) as a more important factor in Pitt’s resignation than the king’s position on Catholic emancipation.

Pares, Richard. King George III and the Politicians. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1953. The classic study of George III’s involvement in politics, especially strong in its treatment of his dealings with his ministers. A useful supplement to Barnes in assessing Pitt’s relationship with the king.

Reilly, Robin. William Pitt the Younger, 1759-1806. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1979. A solid biography that provides a generally well-balanced treatment of Pitt’s life and career. Makes some interesting suggestions as to why Pitt never married.

Rose, J. Holland. The Life of William Pitt. 2 vols. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1923. Long the standard biography of Pitt, generally favorable in its assessment. Still useful, especially for its coverage of his later years. Gives a higher appraisal of Pitt as a war leader than most subsequent historians.

Turner, Michael J. Pitt the Younger: A Life. London: Hambledon and London, 2003. Focuses on Pitt’s political career, describing how Pitt gained and used power. Turner defends charges that Pitt unconstitutionally suppressed radical activities during the French Revolution, arguing that Pitt’s security measures were constitutional and limited.