William Pitt, the Younger, was a British politician and statesman to become a Prime Minister of the country in 1873.
Background
William Pitt, the Younger, was born on 28 May 1759, the second son of William Pitt, later first Earl of Chatham, and Hester Grenville. A physically delicate but precocious child, he imbibed Whig politics from boyhood, from his father and his uncle George Grenville, both of whom held the office of prime minister in the 1760s.
Education
He received his earliest education from a private tutor and then went on to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, graduating with an M.A. in 1/76. He then trained as a barrister and joined the western assize circuit.
Career
He sought election to Parliament, but failed to win the seat for Cambridge University in September 1789, trailing by 142 votes. However, at a by-election in January 1781, he was elected to the House of Commons for Sir James Lowther’s pocket borough of Appleby in Westmoreland, at the age of 21.
He became chancellor of the exchequer 18 months later, at age 23, and prime minister in December 1783 at age 24, being the youngest politician ever to hold the office. He served as prime minister for over 17 years, longer than anyone else except Robert Walpole, during a period of momentous economic and social change that encompassed both the Industrial and the French revolutions. Moreover, throughout this period he combined the offices of prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer, achieving in the view of E. J. Evans an almost unrivaled “understanding of the nation’s changing finances over such a long period.”
When North fell in 1782, Pitt declined a subordinate role in the Rockingham ministry. After Rockingham’s death, he served in Shelburne’s administration as chancellor of the exchequer from July 1782 until February 1783. He was Shelburne’s only effective spokesman in the House of Commons. He adopted Shelburne’s plans for a reform of customs and for stricter control of public offices, but he failed to secure the support of the House of Lords for the proposed legislation.
After the resignation of Shelburne and the dismissal of the Fox-North coalition by George III, Pitt took office as prime minister and First Lord of the Treasury on 19 December 1783. His minority administration was not expected to survive long beyond the Christmas recess and was thence cynically dubbed the “mince pie” administration. However, he gradually consolidated his position before asking George III to dissolve Parliament. He then achieved a landslide victory in the ensuing general election, backed both by the exercise of royal patronage and by significant victories in many open constituencies, such as the larger borough seats and the highly populated county seats of Middlesex and Yorkshire. Pitt himself was elected for Cambridge University, heading the poll with 351 votes, and he continued to represent that con-stituency for the remainder of his life, facing only one further contested election in 1790.
Achievements
Views
He quickly emerged as a promising orator, advocating both economic and parliamentary reform, and as a vociferous critic of Lord North, whom he blamed for the loss of the American colonies.
The Younger Pitt combined conservative and reformist instincts in an era when party labels were confusing. Like his father, Pitt was never a party man. He believed in the maintenance of the balance between monarch, Lords, and Commons established after 1688 and dealt adroitly with the regency crisis of 1788. For the most part, up to 1801, Pitt retained the confidence of George III, with whom, in the view of Ehrman, he enjoyed a “guarded working relationship.”
His parliamentary authority depended more on the competence of his ministerial appointments, his skill in debate, and his support from independent members than on close party ties. “I do not wish ... to call myself anything but an Independent Whig,” he wrote to the Earl of Westmoreland in July 1779. Moreover, J. W. Derry has maintained that even following the party realignment that produced the Pitt-Portland administration, “Pitt never ceased to call himself an independent Whig”. Conventionally described by most textbooks as a Tory, Pitt may be more accurately viewed, according to Evans, as the “midwife of modern Conservatism,” which was the “legacy of second-generation Pittites”—notably Liverpool, Castlereagh, and Canning
Personality
Although his administration was impaired by the loss of the Grenvillites, and although Napoleons victories at Ulm and Austerlitz effectively destroyed the Third Coalition, Pitt remained a symbol of national defiance, and he lived to hear news of the British naval victory at Trafalgar. Pitt worked long hours, drank heavily, and was temperamentally aloof and introverted, but he was widely mourned by the British public after he died in 1806, at the age of 46.
Quotes from others about the person
J. Holland Rose in 1911 credited Pitt with promoting Britain’s national revival after the devastating loss of the American colonies. E. J. Evans has emphasized the role of other factors in the transformation of Britain’s economic prospects, such as the dramatic increase in overseas trade during the eighteenth century, and Britain’s early lead in industrial production, which was only temporarily checked by the American War. Indeed, the value of Britain’s exports almost doubled between the mid-1780s and the mid-1790s, with those to the newly independent United States increasing by 125 percent. His most recent biographer, John Ehrman, has suggested that one of Pitt’s most enduring legacies was in giving “a modernising tone to the practice of government” (Ehrman 1996); and Eric Evans has acknowledged that “British government was substantially more efficient and professional” (Evans 1997) at the end of Pitt’s premiership than it had been at the beginning.