politician prime minister statesman
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.
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.
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.
Pitt’s first ministry (December 1783-March 1801) was characterized by financial and administrative reform, in many cases involving a refinement of policies projected by his predecessors Walpole, North, and Shelburne. As a consequence of the American War, Britain had acquired a national debt of £242.9 million. Pitt’s response was to cut expenditure, improve the efficiency of tax collecting, and raise new taxes. The heaviest indirect taxes were imposed on luxuries consumed disproportionately by the better-off, such as fashionable men’s hats and women’s ribbons; but other taxes, on such essential items as candles, also had a detrimental impact on the poor, especially during the difficult winter months when unemployment was high.
Pitt discouraged smuggling by reducing customs duties and enabling more effective searching of vessels at sea. By 1790 the revenue from duties on wines, spirits, and tobacco had increased by between 29 percent and 63 percent over the levels collected when Pitt entered office. In 1786 Pitt revived and modified the Sinking Fund, originally devised in 1717 to reduce the national debt, under specially appointed commissioners. The scheme worked well until the unprecedented costs of the war with revolutionary France caused the national debt to escalate again from £243 million to £359 million between 1793 and 1797—so alarming the government that it suspended cash payments by the Bank of England and trebled taxes on luxuries. Indeed, by early 1798, debt repayment constituted almost one-third of total government expenditure, prompting Pitt to introduce a new tax on income and to phase out land tax. He believed economic reform was necessary to improve public administration. He reduced the use of patronage, encouraged promotion by merit, and simplified financial administration and accountability through his Consolidated Fund Act of 1787.
Influenced by the ideas of Adam Smith, Pitt regarded trade expansion within Europe as a means of compensating for the loss of the American colonies. He negotiated a wide-ranging commercial treaty with France in 1786 and entered into trade negotiations with seven other European states between 1784 and 1792. In 1785, however, opposition from English industrialists, the Irish Parliament, and the House of Lords thwarted his attempts to secure the commercial union of the British Isles. Successive defeats in the Commons of his motions for parliamentary reform also caused him to abandon in-definitely further proposals after 1785. He also failed to secure the abolition of the slave trade in 1792. However, his India Act of 1784, one of his most important administrative reforms, placed the East India Company under a board of control responsible to the Crown; and his Canada Act of 1791 strengthened the position of the Anglican Church and the development of the landed aristocracy so as to make impossible any revolution on the American model. In 1788 he ended Britain’s diplomatic isolation by concluding a Triple Alliance with Prussia and Holland designed to limit French influence. Exploiting the alliance, Pitt launched a successful diplomatic campaign against Spain in the dispute over Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, leading to Spanish renunciation of claims to sovereignty over the territory.
During the French Revolution his main desire was for peace, and he has been criticized for allowing Britain to enter the war unprepared and undermanned and for spending too much time and effort on naval warfare with France in the Caribbean rather than concentrating on the Continental struggle. His strategy was to support Britain’s European allies financially and militarily in direct attacks on the French, though the British expeditions to Toulon and Vendée failed miserably. The First Coalition, which Britain joined in 1793, appeared promising at the outset, but after October 1797 Britain alone among the European powers continued the war with revolutionary France; and the Second Coalition of 1798 collapsed after a couple of years. Pitt underestimated both French military capacity and the French sense of patriotic identity. Naval successes overseas were won at a heavy price, though the navy proved more successful in defending the country against invasion. However, when Pitt left office in 1801, Britain remained undefeated.
At home he has been criticized for exaggerating the danger of insurrection and consequently overreacting to popular radical movements in the 1790s. Fresh legislation restricting civil liberties was indeed introduced in most parliamentary sessions from 1792 to 1801, including the suspension of habeas corpus in 1794. However, this repressive legislation was seldom utilized and hardly constituted a regime of terror on the scale of developments in France. In contrast, his concern for the security of Ireland during the French Wars resulted in 1,500 executions of Irish rebels in 1798, and his subsequent decision to terminate the Irish Parliament produced a controversial union that exacerbated Anglo-Irish relations for over a century.
After carrying the Act of Union with Ireland, he resigned in 1801 when George III rejected Roman Catholic emancipation. The renewal of the war with France weakened the Addington administration, and Pitt returned to office for his second ministry in May 1804.
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
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.
Pitt never married.
